Join us for our very first episode where Carlos and Satch have one of their amazing conversations, recorded and airing for the first time! This one’s all about emotional mastery, what’s happening within us when intense emotion arises and how to deal with it more effectively. They cover things such as road rage, how to effectively manage yourself during an “amygdala hijack,” and how to apply some principles of NLP for more influential communications. Buckle up! (For in-page player, scroll to bottom below episode transcript)
#angermanagement #fear #emotionalmastery
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Oliver: 00:05 You’re listening to The Authenticity Show where you get to eavesdrop on great conversations about health, creativity, and the quest for excellence. Your hosts are Carlos Casados and Satch Purcell. First up, Carlos and Satch each share a personal story about road rage, how they dealt with the experience and what they learned from it.
Satch: 00:39 I think I might have shared this story with you. This is a true story, by the way. This really happened to me, right. And, uh…
Carlos: 00:39 Get out the popcorn.
Satch: 00:46 Yeah. This was one of those eye opening moments for me. It was, it started off with a case of road rage.
Satch: 01:00 This was many, many years ago. I was a much younger man. And I got really upset at somebody on the road as we all have at some point.
Carlos: 01:00 Yep.
Satch: 01:13 And, it was one of those arguments that…
Carlos: 01:13 Guilty as charged.
Satch: 01:16 Yeah, you know, it was one of those arguments that, that could have come to physical blows. It didn’t. Thank goodness, you know, thank goodness it didn’t. But I will admit that in my mind, I did beat the crap out of this guy, in my brain.
Carlos: 01:16 (echo effect) Amygdala Hijack…
Satch: 01:33 Right, right. Exactly. Yeah. My lizard brain completely destroyed this man. And in my mind, I remember just pounding this guy with my right arm, just beating him to a pulp. Now this didn’t really happen.
Carlos: 01:33 Right.
Satch: 01:49 It happened in my mind.
Carlos: 01:49 You strongly visualized it.
Satch: 01:54 Yeah, I very strongly visualized it, it was a very emotionally charged experience, and… BUT I want to, I want to point this out. I never physically did anything. I didn’t go home and beat up the pillow. I didn’t, I never physically… I didn’t punch the air. I was just really P.O.’d in my mind. And to my surprise, the next maybe three days or so, my whole right shoulder and scapula was unbelievably sore. Like I really did it. And I learned a powerful lesson from that experience is that even thinking tremendously violent thoughts caused the same type of delayed onset muscle soreness. And I’m talking real serious soreness. I was in pain the coming days, as though I really beat this guy up. So, you know, I mean, it’s like my brain caused my muscles to make lactic acid and making me sore as though I really had an intense workout. So I think, I think emotions and thoughts are also food and we need to process and digest them properly. We need to eat them properly in. And uh, this is a topic I think, probably deserves more discussion…
Carlos: 03:17 Strongly visualized, strongly pictured events are experienced as real to the unconscious mind, which is one of the reasons why sports hypnosis is so effective. And why in a really well taught yoga class, there’s a visualized practice, you know, there’s a part where there are visualizations or there’s even phrases and affirmations that can go along with the postures that are, you know, trying to unify the mind, the body and, what they would call Spirit.
Satch: 03:52 Sure, yeah. Our brain and body doesn’t know the difference between imagination and reality.
Carlos: 03:52 Right.
Satch: 03:55 You know, and so here I am, I’m sore because I beat this guy up. Did I really beat the guy up? Well, no. But did I? Kind of. It wasn’t healthy for me. You know, I felt awful after that. I learned from that day that, that your thoughts, you know, especially my own anger, I had to get that under control because I could not allow, if that was powerful enough to make me sore for days after my imaginary fight, what is that doing to my health?
Carlos: 03:55 Yeah.
Satch: 04:23 My heart, my brain, my hormones.
Carlos: 04:23 Exactly.
Satch: 04:25 So that’s terrible for me. You know, it’s so important to think good thoughts and digest healthy thoughts, you know.
Carlos: 04:37 Yeah, you know, on the topic of road rage, I learned a huge lesson myself one day, many, many years ago. I may have told you this already, but I was with my girlfriend at the time and there was a really big refrigerator sized guy who was swerving his car around and yelling, and his fist out the window and everything. I’d just come out of a restaurant. I came onto the road. Now I don’t really know whether I cut him off or, or not. I don’t think I did, but if I did, you know, I wasn’t aware of it. But he was absolutely convinced that I had done something wrong. And he was really trying to make it clear to me that he wanted to have my head on a chopping block. Right? And something in me, I think it was because I had my girlfriend with me and I was worried about what would happen, my amygdala got hijacked….
Satch: 04:37 Sure.
Carlos: 04:37 (echo effect) Amygdala hijack.
Satch: 04:37 Yeah.
Carlos: 05:31 And literally seized control of me at the moment and I did something so stupid. I pulled the parking brake on my truck.
Satch: 05:41 Oh my god.
Carlos: 05:44 Flung open the door, and I went at this person who was in their car. And something about how committed I was to his demise, I suppose, shocked him out of his rage. And when I saw his reaction of fear, genuine reaction to fear, just like, click, I snapped out of my rage because I noticed that something had shifted and I was no longer in my amygdala reaction. That base brain reaction. I’d shifted back into a prefrontal cortex, you know, compassion and visualizing the after effects of what might happen if I did this and all these kinds and things just sort of I got this global perspective suddenly like, Oh, wait a minute, what am I doing and what’s this creating and, whoa, I need to stop right now and suddenly our conversation just went down to a normal talking tone, there was no yelling and I just said, hey, whatever happened, I’m sorry…
Carlos: 06:50 And he said the same thing. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. And it triggered me to say, well, ok, we’re good. Right? You know, kind of thing. And I got back into the truck and started driving again, and that had such an effect on me because I thought, that is so not me. And yet, here I was doing that. That was so not me. And here I, I’m like teaching Yoga and Xi Gong and meditation and I think I was vegetarian at the time and I was just like, it was absolutely not me and I, you know me, I’m not a violent person.
Satch: 06:50 Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Carlos: 07:25 It was just this reaction of this pure animal kicking in of, I need to defend myself and my girlfriend from this monster that’s attacking me kind of thing. I went into my base brain, my reptilian just dragon just took over
Satch: 07:25 The lizard emerged.
Carlos: 07:41 And um, I thought about it in reflection immediately and realized that the feeling I had that I could connect to in my body was the same feeling that I was getting when I watched The Sopranos. And I was watching…
Satch: 07:41 Ohhh wooow.
Carlos: 07:59 …episode after… I was binge watching The Sopranos, so guess what my unconscious was learning.
Satch: 07:59 (echo effect) Violence, violence, violence. Yes.
Carlos: 08:03 Guess what my unconscious was visualizing was, hey, you handle things by taking out a baseball bat and showing them how it’s done. That was my… and I became like Tony Soprano in that moment. And so I’ll be honest with you, although I was really enjoying the show, and I saw, a few different seasons of it, I didn’t finish the show because I realized that it would be unhealthy for me to continue watching it. Because of the cognitive shift in my being after looking at it for so long, and now I’m sure I could watch it without the same reactions. I’ve grown since then,
Satch: 08:03 Right, you learned the lesson so now you can see it
Carlos: 08:39 I’ve learned the lesson. Yeah, it’s different, but at the time I really needed to stop. And I realized, hey, that’s not the image I need soaking into my unconscious mind right now. At this moment.
Oliver: 09:12 You’re listening to The Authenticity Show where you get to eavesdrop on great conversations about health, creativity, and the quest for excellence. Your hosts are Carlos Casados and Satch Purcell. Next up, Carlos and Satch discuss the concept of an Internal Representation and how your psychological state can affect your ability to learn, heal, communicate and understand.
Satch: 09:12 What is an Internal Representation?
Carlos: 09:59 Internal representation we call an IR for short. It’s just the way that you represent any idea or any, anything that you witness internally. Why it’s important is that, based on the kind of internal representation you have, it will change your emotional state and if it changes your emotional state, that’ll have an effect on your body, your physiology, and ultimately how you behave. So, in the NLP model of communication, if you have an external event, whatever that is, say you’re witnessing a traumatic event like 9/11 or seeing a beautiful sunset, each of those is going to have a unique representation on the inside of your mind, not just because they’re different events, but because of the filters that you process the external event through. And as you identify whatever it is that you’re experiencing, those sets of filters that it passes through change the way you identify it.
Satch: 09:59 OK.
Carlos: 11:04 When you have an external event, one of the first things that happens is you delete stuff that’s not important to you.
Satch: 11:04 Right, right. OK.
Carlos: 11:12 And so if you really don’t care that much about nature, you might not notice the amazing spider web with the glistening beads of dew on it from the sprinkler or whatever, shining like beads or diamonds or something like that. You wouldn’t notice this little beautiful pieces of what it is you’re perceiving. On the other hand, if you were really into, let’s say I don’t know, baseball, and you saw a baseball card on the floor, you’re more likely to see it, than the person who isn’t even though you’re in the same room or in the same place.
Satch: 11:48 Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Carlos: 11:50 So we delete a lot and that takes care of this mass amount of information that you’re exposed to and you’re filtering it out so that you can then select what is important to you. And there’s a lot of reasons for these filters to be in place. But basically everybody does these three things. They delete, they generalize and they distort.
Carlos: 12:14 Your life experience affects how you, what you would choose to delete from any picture, any situation. And the same with generalization. If you have a lot of experiences, whether negative or positive, it’s going to change how you generalize about things like relationships, people, bosses, traffic, um, cooking, eating, I mean, all these things you start to generalize about. It’s not just that you generalize about individual things, you generalize about concepts, too. And distortions are interesting because distortions allow you, for example, if I turn my head sideways, you’re not wondering who I am, you still know it’s me.
Satch: 12:14 Yeah. Right, right.
Carlos: 12:59 I mean, you can distort the image or the memory based upon the fact that I turned my head, you know who I am still, it’s, it sounds crazy or silly maybe, but it’s really true. You, you distort images all the time or even the blind spots in your eye are distortions, it’s hallucinations in a way.
Carlos: 13:20 We distort things by thinking that we like them better, or dislike them more. Chocolate is good, strawberries, bad or whatever. Brussels sprouts are horrible and fried chicken is great. I mean, we have the, like our preferences and those are distortions, too. Everybody does these three things. They delete, they generalize and they distort.
Satch: 13:47 I’ll tell you something happened yesterday. Last night I had a chance to do some acupuncture on an eighty two year old lady. She was the sweetest, cutest little old lady ever. And she had really bad knees, so I was going to do some acupuncture. And she was very talkative, you know, a pretty spry, eighty two year old, and she had taken lots of pain medications, you know, opiates and things like that to deal with her bad knees. And so she asks me, now, how does the acupuncture work? She says, right? And I explained that I’m going to do acupuncture on her elbow to treat her knee. And she was like, well, how does, you know, how is this possible? She couldn’t figure it out. And I think what I did, this is an analogy I’ve given lots of patients before, and I forget where I picked this up from. Somebody said this once, maybe I picked it up in a seminar and it just stuck with me over the years because it’s so true. And I think what I did was I created a new internal representation for her as to how acupuncture works. And I said, well, you started off as one cell and then all the trillions of cells in your body came from that one cell, right? So it’s crazy not to think that your elbow is connected to your knee. That your ankles are connected to your wrists, that your wrists are connected to your neck. That because you started off as one cell, how could they not have a relationship? And an amazing relationship. And she just was mesmerized by that analogy. Then we put some needles in her elbow and her knee pain went away.
Carlos: 13:47 Awesome.
Satch: 15:33 It was incredible. And she was just so excited. And then what I tried to do is to just kept feeding her positivity. Well, I’m so glad we’re doing this, I said, isn’t it great? This is fantastic, I’m excited to see what kind of good results you get.
Carlos: 15:33 That’s an example of controlling someone else’s IR.
Satch: 15:33 OK.
Carlos: 15:53 You didn’t give her time to change the IR because you told her this compelling, plausible story about why it made sense. And then you kind of built on it, you stayed in rapport, you talked to her about it, you kept referring to it and then adding on where necessary and in this short amount of time that you, you gave her the treatment, she was probably very wrapped up and absorbed in you and your story and it became her reality after that because the internal representation she was creating with the words that you gave her were totally in line with what the state of mind you needed her to be in.
Satch: 15:53 Cool.
Carlos: 16:38 And that’s actually the question you ask when you’re about to do anything really, with another person, is what state do I need them to be in, in order to be most receptive to the methodology that I’m using or the lesson I’m about to give them, like in a teaching setting, or in a healing setting like you were doing.
Satch: 16:59 OK. OK, cool.
Carlos: 16:59 Yeah. That’s really great.
Satch: 17:04 Internal representations. I love that concept.
Carlos: 17:05 I know it’s, it’s huge. It’s foundational, too, because if you know that, a lot of other things open up.
Satch: 17:16 Yeah. Here’s an example of using an analogy… I guess you would probably call this a reframe, I guess, but now that I’m thinking about it. But, you ever done paraffin wax?
Carlos: 17:16 Yeah, on the hands? Those are great, feels so good.
Satch: 17:32 The ladies know about paraffin, right? Because sometimes at the salons you put your hands and little paraffin wax bath and you pull your hand out and it dries instantaneously and makes your skin all soft. Well…
Carlos: 17:32 Feels great.
Satch: 17:44 Yeah, it does, it’s amazing. I would love to put my whole body in a paraffin bath, it’d be…
Carlos: 17:44 Me, too.
Satch: 17:44 …just incredible…
Carlos: 17:52 Yeah, that’d be awesome.
Satch: 17:55 Paraffin is used in occupational therapy and physical therapy. The therapy fields like to use paraffin bath. It’s great for people that have problems with their hands. Right? So like if somebody has arthritis, hot packs and ultrasound and e-stim and stuff like that is not gonna be very useful for fingers. You can’t get all the nooks and crannies, and it’s hard to reach those areas. And so paraffin is perfect. You just go to the little paraffin bath and you dip your hands in it and then you dip it in several times, and then you wrap your hands in you a trash bag and some towels and let them soak for awhile, and you just soak in all the heat and it’s really good for the joints. But what I’ve found is a lot of the older patients, because their skin’s a little bit thinner, it’s sort of sensitive and when they stick their hand in the paraffin, it’s a little hotter than they expect and they kind of jerk and they jump and they’d be like, oh, that’s hot. And they freak out about it. And I learned that if I set it up for them before they put their hand in it, I would never ever have a problem with anybody putting their hands all the way in the paraffin wax. And here’s how I did it. Right. I saw a couple of ladies just sort of, you know, flip out when they touch the hot wax, and I said, OK, this is paraffin wax. It’s a nice melted wax and it feels hot like a Jacuzzi….
Satch: 19:26 Like you know how when you first start to get into a Jacuzzi it’s a little bit hot and this is a little hot, but it also feels so good. I said, now, this won’t burn you any more than a Jacuzzi would burn you, so just wanted you to enjoy the hotness of the Jacuzzi. And I never ever for the rest of my career had anybody have a problem putting their hands in the paraffin wax.
Carlos: 19:45 That’s beautiful that it works that well and that’s perfect use. Yeah. That is a reframe. We call that kind of a re-frame
Satch: 19:45 A pre-frame, there you go. That’s great.
Carlos: 19:54 Which is extremely powerful because basically it sets the pace. I mean, if you pre frame a situation, you’re basically reframing it ahead of time.
Satch: 20:05 Right. I figured that one out about 11 years ago, you know.
Carlos: 20:05 Oh Wow.
Satch: 20:08 Never had a problem with that ever since because it works so darn good, you know.
Carlos: 20:12 And you see the opposite of, cases where people who don’t do that and what can potentially happen and someone who’s less experienced than you and knows less might not know to pre-frame the situation.
Satch: 20:25 Yeah, it sort of reminds me of if you, you pick up a drink and you forget what drink is in the cup and it takes your brain a few seconds to recognize what it is, for those few seconds you flip out like this is the most disgusting thing you just put in your mouth and you go, oh, wait a minute, that’s just lemonade. Oh, that’s good. And we finish drinking it. Or you think you’re taking a sip of coke or soda or something, and instead of soda it’s milk and there’s like two seconds of flip out, freak out. Oh my God, what did I put… Oh, that’s just milk. Ok, that’s no big deal. You know, it’s funny. Like, I didn’t like it for two seconds and now I do like it. What’s that all about?
Carlos: 21:02 Yeah, exactly. Power of suggestion. And taking advantage of it for the benefit of mankind. That’s great. That’s super cool.
Carlos: 21:13 Pre frames are used a lot in classes to, you know, when you, when you basically tell them on the first day what you expect.
Satch: 21:13 Oh yeah.
Carlos: 21:21 You know, about your cell phones and about paying attention, turning in assignments. That’s a pre-frame because you’re setting, you’re sort of laying out the rules, the ground rules and telling them what to expect and then whether or not all of those things actually happen or not, they’re expecting it and oftentimes just by expecting it, it changes the way it rolls. If you say, you can expect me to take your cell phone if it goes off in class and I’ll hold it for you until the end of class, the likelihood is that people won’t let their cell phone go off.
Satch: 21:21 Yeah, yeah.
Carlos: 21:21 It’s embarrassing.
Satch: 22:03 I should get a bucket just put up in the room and every time a cell phone goes off, it goes in the bucket and we’ll see how many cell phones we can get in the bucket. It will always be empty. Right?
Carlos: 22:12 Definitely. It would be if it was ice water.
Satch: 22:14 Yeah, for sure.
Carlos: 22:16 I think that the NLP model of communication is elegant because it takes into account things like beliefs, values, memories. Those things are filters, too. If you have something that’s more important to you, that changes how you delete, distort, and generalize.
Satch: 22:16 Oh yeah.
Carlos: 22:40 Certain beliefs you have, memories about… I mean, Gosh, if you had a negative memory around something that’s going to definitely change what you filter for. I mean screw me once. Right?
Satch: 22:40 Right.
Carlos: 22:50 That’s that saying and you’re like, Hey, I’m looking for it now. And it’s a different different thing altogether that changes the frame, the pre-frame going into any new circumstance that might be perceived as similar when you’re generalizing that it might be similar, you filter that in. But also little known things like meta-programs, which are…
Satch: 22:50 Yeah, what’s that, what’s a meta-program?
Carlos: 23:19 Yeah, meta-programs are, it’s something that some of the early NLP pioneers were noticing about persona. They’re kind of, I almost want to say that they’re part of the blueprint of an individual personality where they’re way of filtering information. And there are whole bunch of them, I don’t think we’ve identified every single meta-program that exists, but an example of one would be filtering for sameness versus difference.
Satch: 23:19 OK, OK.
Carlos: 23:50 Have you ever noticed that some people have a tendency to make connections between things more often? They go, wow, this is just like the blah blah, blah that I had blah, blah, blah ago.
Satch: 23:50 Yeah.
Carlos: 24:03 And other people have a tendency to say things like, well, this is nothing like the x, y, or z that I had before. It’s the same kind of thing, only it’s just flipped on its end.
Satch: 24:03 Well my other wart didn’t behave that way.
Carlos: 24:19 Right. And so sameness versus difference is a major filtering. process that is one of the meta-programs.Ssameness versus difference.
Satch: 24:31 Sameness versus difference. You know, that’s interesting. I use that to help students learn how to memorize material. And I’ll tell you my philosophy on that. I do get students that maybe they struggle a little bit, they’re having a hard time adapting to what the expectations are in higher education and maybe they’re not doing so hot on tests, and we get together and start working on stuff and I always ask them, how are you studying? And it’s always the same. Well, I print the powerpoints and I just review everything and I highlight stuff. And it’s all the same ole, same ole, same ole. And I say, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not how you have to study. OK, let’s address your study style. And I tell them, everything you study has to be compared to something else. Don’t you dare study anything without comparing it to something else. I said, so imagine you’re in outer space…
Satch: 25:29 You don’t know up from down, left from right, forward from back. You can’t see anything. You’re in pitch black and you don’t even know who you are, where you are. You’re just confused, and all of a sudden you bump into something, you can’t see what it is, but you bump into something. Boom. And you go, oh, well, I’m here and that thing is there. And now there’s two points in space, right? There’s you and that other thing. So at least now you know where you are in comparison to that thing you bumped into. Then you’ll float over some other direction away from that thing and you bump into something else. Dooh! You go, wait a minute. That thing is over there and this thing is over here and I’m over here. So now I have three points in space. You see what I mean, and so out of nothing comes the opportunity to start remembering things by comparison.
Satch: 26:20 So what I do is I have the students say, OK, you read a powerpoint slide, you’ll find a concept, you put it up on the board or you put it on a piece of paper, and then you read another concept and you put that up on the board over on the other side. You go, now, what’s the same between these two concepts? What’s different about these two concepts? Hmmm. OK. And I get my students to start making these detailed lists, like, alright let’s say they’re learning about diseases. All right. OK. So these are all the… I’m just gonna pick psych, OK? So these are all the psychotic diseases, you know, we’ve got schizophrenia. And with schizophrenia, there’s these subtypes, you know, and then there’s the mood disorders, and then there’s the subtypes, and so on and so forth.
Satch: 27:02 And then, so what I get them to do is say, OK, all of these diseases, what do they all have in common? What are the common symptoms, you know? So, if I remember that all of this chunk of material has all these things in common, I don’t have to memorize those individually. I’ve learned a whole chunk, right? All of these things have… maybe depression, let’s say, these are all the diseases that have depression. Easy. These are all the diseases that have hallucinations. Easy. Now what’s the differences now? Of all the ones that have hallucinations, what are the differences between them? Well, this one is hallucinations, then it also has a mood disorder component. OK, good. This one has hallucinations, but the person gets rigid and they can’t move. OK, good. So now by identifying everything that is the same and everything that is different, they’ve created a comparisons like they’re lost in space, like I don’t know this material. Now they know exactly where they are. And I’ve heard this or something similar to this being described as cognitive architecture. This idea that you’re building these cognitive structures in your mind. And so what I try to do is get them to build these structures in their mind based upon comparisons. And it works. They get so much better grades, they start to like the material because they’ve learned how to dissect large volumes of information and cut it down into sameness and differentness, just like what you’re describing. It’s amazing.
Carlos: 28:42 That’s brilliant, Satch, that’s really brilliant. I mean way to get people engaged in a learning process, too, because much like having a conversation with a person, active listening helps with retention. If you’re really participating by feeding things back to the person, so what you’re saying was this, correct? And how does that relate to that? You’re involved in it. But if you’re studying by yourself and it’s not a conversation with another human being, but if you’re, in a sense, having a theoretical conversation with an idea or with your mind, or a part of your mind, and you’re making all those connections conceptually, I would imagine is making connections neurologically, too. Because you’re building all these ways to reference it, and then of course your memory would have an easier time because it becomes holographic. You’ve got all these different connections that’s creating more than just a flat two dimensional idea. It’s got layers and texture and depth to it. And yeah, that’s really brilliant.
Satch: 29:47 You know, I think, students, not just students, everybody, we have a tendency not to realize that the photographic memory has to be created. You can create a photographic memory of anything you want. Like for example, if I were to say, Carlos, could you imagine you’re standing in your bedroom right now?
Carlos: 29:47 Yes.
Satch: 30:09 And can you just start naming… Just imagine you’re standing in your bedroom and in your mind’s eye, go around the room and just start naming as many objects as you can right now.
Carlos: 30:20 OK, there’s the bed, there’s the posts around the bed. There’s the dresser on the side. There is the mirror. There is the floor. I see the blinds. I see the chairs. I see the Chinese table. I see the other recliner chair. I see the exit to the balcony. I’m seeing, the books, I can name many of the books that are there, including some DVDs that are there. The television. The Fan. Uh, let’s see here…
Satch: 31:00 That’s probably good enough.
Carlos: 31:01 I could continue.
Satch: 31:03 You could, you really could. And you could probably go and give me even more detail of each of those items, right? You could probably start telling me colors and sharp edges, soft edges, right?
Carlos: 31:11 I could tell you marks in the ceiling that looked like other things.
Satch: 31:17 Right, right. Pareidolia. Yeah, I feel like that mark’s always staring at me.
Carlos: 31:19 Exactly. One looks like, a rose and the other one looks like L A as in Los Angeles.
Satch: 31:22 There you go. Yeah. So the reason I had you do that is because that’s photographic memory, right? You know, it’s the idea that if I were to now have to memorize that list of things that you… I mean, you just said, you know, 20 or more items just on the fly, right? And, you’re not trying to remember them on your drive on the way over here tonight. OK, what are all the things in my bedroom? What about, you know…
Carlos: 31:48 I better be ready when Satch asks me later.
Satch: 31:50 Right, exactly because he’s going to test me tonight, right? And really what it comes down to is, memory is incredible except humans need to use their memory the way it was intended to work, and it’s intended to work that way. That’s how memory works, it’s very procedural, that follows… it uses a lot of procedural memory, the idea of, well, this then that. If I’m here, then I look there, then I’m going to see that, and… you know what I mean? And so when a student or anybody out there an employee at a new job or something, when that person has large volumes of information that they need to remember, um, you cannot make your memory recall things from a list. And so if I have students that are trying to remember things off a powerpoint slide, how about we build a room in your mind? You know, let’s just build a room. It’s easy, look how much stuff you can remember. Then you can start to compare things. What’s on the left side of the room versus the right side of the room. If the dresser had an opponent on the other side of the room, what would it be? It’s amazing how the mind works and stores and retrieves, and… here’s a question. Those pictures in your mind, are those internal representations?
Carlos: 33:09 Oh, absolutely.
Satch: 33:09 OK.
Carlos: 33:09 Yeah.
Satch: 33:11 There we go. Wow. OK. It’s all about the IR.
Carlos: 33:20 It is. It is. Well, the IR, as I mentioned, it affects how you feel and how you feel affects your physiology and how your physiology is effected, affects how you behave.
Satch: 33:20 There you go.
Carlos: 33:31 And how you behave effects what results you get. So, do you think they’re important? I think so.
Satch: 33:31 They sure are.
Carlos: 33:35 IRs are very important.
Satch: 33:35 Very, very important. Wow.
Carlos: 33:40 Yeah. So I’m really excited because last night I got to see Dr Janice Davis at Stanbridge College.
Satch: 33:44 Oh yeah. She runs the master’s degree program in Occupational Therapy.
Carlos: 33:48 Yes. And by the way, thank you for introducing me to her.
Satch: 33:51 Oh yeah. She’s one of my favorite people on Earth. Seriously, she probably doesn’t know I feel that way, but now she does.
Carlos: 33:56 Well I can, I can see why because she’s really amazing. I mean, in Doctor Davis’s class, I could see how she was enjoying that portion of the class because she was taking notes and she kind of nodding your head and smiling at a point because I was relating to the IR that, you know, describing the IR, but then talking about how, to the class, when you’re with your clients, it’s so important to manage the IR you’re creating with them.
Carlos: 34:30 And I gave some examples and ways to stay in rapport, and how to get them from a depressed state maybe to an action state where they could do the exercises. Basically there was some, I kind of touched upon some active listening and connecting. I use some spatial metaphors to speak to their unconscious. And this is a pattern of influence that I learned in NLP, but basically as I was telling them the story, I moved from one place in the room to another. And I made the unconscious analogical marking of territory or space in the room to be associated with particular feelings. And then I use that to communicate meta information that wasn’t being communicated specifically in my language, but was in alignment with what I was saying. So in other words here I was talking about, OK, you’ve got someone who’s really depressed and I built the association physically with the area I was standing to be something like a negative status.
Carlos: 35:39 I refer… I kind of embodied the person who had the negative state by voicing their thoughts and voicing the physiology. And I got the whole room to get into a slightly depressed state. I said, go ahead and, I promise you that we won’t do this for a very long time, just a few seconds, but just to illustrate the point, could we all just think of something that’s a real bummer. Something you’re like, Oh man, that sucks. And I said, just notice how you feel. Notice what goes on in your body. And I got everybody kind of inducted into a little bit of a negative IR. I didn’t paint it for them, I just told them, paint your own negative IR about something that’s a bummer. And then I moved over to a different part of the room and I said, OK everybody, well first of all, let’s shake it off.
Carlos: 36:26 And as I walked over to the new area, I clapped my hands, I did something auditory to kind of break it up. And I said, all right, now think of a situation where you did really well and you were so surprised at how awesome you did on a test, or maybe you got a job, or maybe somebody asked you out at one point in your life that you never thought you would, or just something really awesome happened and you feel really good. Just notice how you feel now. And I asked everybody to identify what it was that was the difference. And they said, well, I feel taller. I feel lifted. I feel like I’m smiling. And everybody in the room was smiling like, yeah, look around the room. You guys are all smiling. So do you think that an internal representation can affect how you feel?
Carlos: 37:12 And they’re like, they are all laughing and nodding their heads like, Duh. And I say, OK, and you guys are into medical science here, do you think that how you feel affects your chemistry? And they were like nodding their heads like, Duh. Yeah, of course it does. So do you think that you can affect this change in the client by changing the IR you’re creating? And everybody kinda… It’s sunk in, and I could see Dr Davis in the background smiling going, yes, like I’m so glad you covered this, because I’ve been wanting them to get the idea of really knowing how important it is, the way you communicate.
Oliver: 38:00 You’ve been listening to The Authenticity Show with your hosts, Carlos Casados and Satch Purcell. The show is produced by Oliver Althoen. Our theme music is composed by Oliver Althoen. You can find more information on our website, authenticityshow.com. Thanks for listening and have an authentic day.
Music: 38:00 (outro music)
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Join us for one of our most downloaded episodes which happens to be our very first episode! In this one, Carlos and Satch have one of their amazing conversations with each other. This one’s all about emotional mastery, what’s happening within us when intense emotion arises and how to deal with it more effectively. They cover things such as road rage, how to effectively manage yourself during an “amygdala hijack,” and how to apply some principles of NLP for more influential communications. Buckle up!
