Ben, aspiring to be a cardiac surgeon, is in his teens and has ONE big challenge - he is not doing well in his exams. There is nothing as disheartening as missing out on your dreams because of one challenge that is beyond your control. Ben puts in the time to study, he answers the questions several times before the exam, but when he is sitting in the exam, trying to write the answers to the question on his exam paper, he goes blank. Just like so many people, for whom at the moment of their performance, something unexpected happens.
Little did he know that there is a simple method to overcome this. And you can learn it too, in this story.
Ben comes to Chennai with his mother. He is not looking at me. He tries to smile, to show he is happy to be here, but he is filled with some shame and guilt. The last time I met Ben, he was a happy boy, he had conquered what the world told him was not possible. About a couple of years before, he was diagnosed as being autistic. His mother, a doctor herself, knew in her heart that there must be a solution for his unusual behaviours. And he wanted to change because after his throw of anger and intolerance he used to feel guilty about himself. In one of the immersive events, finding himself having overcome all these traits, made Ben feel like a conqueror. When I met him again after that, he was high on confidence, helping several others overcome their challenges.
But this time, it was a different emotion, he felt low and bad asking for help. He had thought he was going to meet me again to share a legacy story, but here he was asking for help once again.
Ben knew I was going to change his perception about him, but he didn’t want me to. And when people feel low and sad, sometimes, they want to hold on to that feeling. I knew I can help him overcome this pebble within minutes. Because it’s not more than a pebble. It may be an overwhelming thing for him, but when you know the mechanism by which your body creates the challenge, you can change it and even use the same mechanism to your advantage to create more resourceful behaviours and feelings.
The challenge for me, at that moment, was not only to help Ben with his exam. But also to TEACH a valuable thing about life. That everytime, you get from your level to the next level, new challenges will appear, and when you have a difficult time facing these new sets of challenges, that doesn’t mean you are a failure, it only means that you didn’t know these were challenges till you got there. And some challenges you solve by yourself, some you solve with a team together, and some challenges are solved for you.
And this is not true just about him, but for every legend in the world.
“The only reason I could look so far ahead was by standing on the shoulder of giants” -
Issac Newton
I start with what is commonly known as a pattern interrupt. I exaggerate his problems, belittle it and make fun of it. He laughs with me. The only reason I can do that and not come across as cold or insensitive, is because in the few seconds I was in the room, I had already built unconscious rapport with him. And thereby, I can use the shortest path to make him laugh and while he is laughing, his brain and neurology opens to new learnings. I know this education I need to give him, has to be done before I help him with his actual problem.
Because once I help him overcome the problem, the unconscious loop in his head, feeling like a failure while seeking help, could be closed. This would mean, I wouldn’t have the window to teach him the value thing about taking help fast enough. And time is something I didn’t have that day. It was a busy business day, it was 9:00 pm already, I was helping my team grow and disrupt a new industry.
And my agenda was to complete the education in a way that stays with Ben for the rest of his life and right after that bring a transformation in the shortest time possible that enables him to remember the things he studies, when he writes his exams.
So, while he is laughing and giggling, his mother, oblivious to the pattern I was interrupting with him, thinks we are having a small talk, and tries to join in. She asks,”how’s business?”. As an Excellence Installation artist, I love to leverage everything that is coming in, to the advantage of the person I am helping. And so, I start narrating the business experience to Ben’s mother in the presence of her son, in a way that is a parallel to what is happening with Ben. I start with one challenge we had years ago, and how we overcame it. How we were at the top of the world, and then the second challenge, and how several challenges followed and we overcame them, and then about a recent challenge, for which we had to take the help of an expert. And as I was narrating these to the mother, I saw Ben in my peripheral vision, listening intently to the stories and feeling a sense of relief and opening up to the idea - new challenges that keep coming could be a sign of growth.
As I continue talking to both of them, I stack several such metaphors from various walks of life over the next 30 minutes, all around the same theme. The key to such installations is to not connect the dots consciously, and so you do not tell the person something like- “your challenge is also like this”. That then becomes advice. And people rarely convert advice to autonomous behaviour. And rarely does advice convert into an innate ability to perceive the world differently. On the contrary, Metaphors, that are unexplained, but curiously picked by the listeners unconscious mind, translates into generating new behaviours over the days, weeks and months to come.
So, I like to leave them as parables, so that to Ben’s conscious mind, it appears like we are talking about business, martial arts, computer programming, music... but to his unconscious mind, we are talking about him and him only. And when you train yourself in installations, you start to notice when the unconscious of a person is tracking the pattern, and thereby their unconscious mind is self-educating from your parables.
After I had thoroughly entertained my audience and felt satisfied about Ben’s new education, I explicitly briefed Ben that we can NOW work on his challenge of forgetting his preparation and his mind going blank during the written exams.
I start by taking him to that exact moment- when he forgets. It is one thing to think about something, and it is another to go back and relive that experience. Using a linguistic technique called ‘past present’, where you talk about the past in present tense, I started to help him remember and go back to that moment, he was able to easily teleport himself to that moment when he actually forgets. And as he went back to that moment, and relieved that experience, I noticed that his hands immediately started shivering.
My body was naturally mirroring him, and I could feel a certain strong feeling around my chest. I asked Ben to pay attention to where in the body this feeling starts. He mumbled ‘chest’, and I said show me with your hand. And as he made a semi-circle movement on his chest, I held his hand, and helped him exaggerate the movement to make him consciously aware. Then I asked him to go deeper, and notice how that feeling is going on a loop.
Almost all feelings in the body, including tightness, heaviness, energy flow, light, floating, crunch, have a very definite circuit and if you can get people to pay enough attention to their body, you can track the circuit. The reason most people can’t do this is, there is so much noise. But if you can relax and go deep and direct your attention to the body sensations, one can notice the circuit of any feeling.
And for most people if you reverse the direction of the movement, for example, from a clockwise movement to the anti-clockwise, the feeling would change from unresourceful to resourceful, from tightness to feeling light and so on.
There is a technique to reverse the direction of the feeling and it is called synesthesia. So, what I asked Ben to do is focus on the movement of that feeling and asked him to imagine a colour around the circuit. And he said, he sees red.
Inside the brain, there is a component called gyrus angular, which is responsible for representing the information in one channel (visual/smell/sound/feeling/taste) in another channel. Neuro-scientists call this as cross mapping. When I was working with a paralysed man from a C5 fracture to regain movements, one of the challenges we had to overcome was that even though he got some of his movements back, he didn’t have feedback on the movement, unless he explicitly saw with his eyes. This was because when people are paralysed, they lose both the movement and the sensation. So, one of the things I had done for him was set up cross mapping, so that every time his toes and ankle moved, his unconscious gave him an internal, visual reference. This allowed him to practise movements without getting up to see if his toes were actually moving.
In the case of Ben, we were setting up cross-mapping for a different outcome. As he visualised this colour that represented the unresourceful feeling, starting in his chest, I asked him to slow down the movement, I saw him slowing down his hand, and then and as he did I asked him to reverse the direction of the movement. When I noticed that his hands were moving now, in the opposite direction maintaining the slower speed, I asked Ben to increase the speed to what feels optimal and as he did, I asked him, “what is the colour of the circuit now?”, and he said that it was yellow.
Ben said, instead of the anxiety and fear, he is feeling light in his chest, like there is an ease in his body. I asked Ben to hold that feeling and stay with it for the next couple of minutes.
After that, we took a break. And when we came back, I took him back once again, to the exam room. And as he teleported there in his mind, he felt a new feeling this time, the same feeling he had when he saw the yellow circuit.
I made Ben understand his unique configuration within his neurology. And told him that he won’t feel that way he felt before during his exams ever again. I also asked him, does he know what to do if he ever felt that way in a different situation, and he quickly showed me with his hands, the new direction in which to spin the feeling.
As a final test, I once again teleported him to the examination moment by using the ‘past present’ linguistic phrasing to relive that moment. And noticed that this time, his hands didn’t shiver. This was proof that Ben could now feel differently in those situations in which he would shiver. And that, his neurology was naturally and automatically giving him a different response to the same situation. Feeling different and resourceful means that he could be in high performance during his exam. And remember the things he had studied for the exam.
Ben went on to write his exams and did them really well.
He sent me a thank you note, and promised to send me chocolates when he becomes a Cardiac Surgeon.
What is important to me about this experience is that there were no so called ‘deep psychological issues’, no connection to his back story, nothing to do with the fact someone had labelled him autistic, none of that - it was just an isolated bad habit, and like any habit, if you repeat it several times, it will change into an innate habit and becomes almost a natural response. The fact that Ben and I know how to go into an altered state, gives us the choice to repeat a new behaviour over a thousand times in a few minutes. In his example. his new behaviour was - spinning the sensations that created his old feelings in a new direction- feelings are involuntary responses that we generally don’t have control over. But doing this can change the way you feel. And since he repeated it enough times, in an altered state, the new feeling in that situation, became his natural innate response.
We all have a naturally occuring trance and it is called sleep. Just repeat new behaviours, you want to develop, master or form, a few times before you go into a deep sleep and you will find yourself, as-if you have practised, your new behaviour several hundred times the next day in the morning.
The most important thing for me, from this experience, is the validation once more, that sometimes, there is no deeper issue and some limitations are just a habit. And the good thing about habits is you can change them, and now you know how!
