A Very Different Look At The Power Of The Mind

In this episode of "A Pane In The Glass Podcast" I conclude "The Survival Game" that we started in the previous episode, so get your score cards ready for the results. In the second part of this episode we hear about a very different approach to the power of the mind with a sound bite involving Dr. Sanjay Gupta (CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent) and a doctor who uses hypnosis to help his patients some of whom are elite athletes. Dr. Gupta's podcast is entitled "Chasing Life". I'm an avid listener! If you are not interested in "The Survival Game" and want to go directly to the power of the mind portion of the episode, use the "chapter" markers to take you there. 

Transcript

Scoring "The Survival Game"

The Power Of Hypnosis

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Well, welcome to another episode of a Pain in the Glass Podcast. This is your host, Bill Shearhart, Chartered Professional Coach with Coaches of Canada, once again coming to you from my home in Grand Bend, Ontario, on the ancestral land of the Kettle and Stony Point First Nations. This week's episode uh is in definitely two parts. Those of you who were with me last week and participated in the survival game, well, that's how we're going to start the episode, because I will reveal the answers, so to speak, the rank ordering of those objects, those 12 objects that were uh rescued from the plane crash. Now, if you didn't uh do the survival game but are still interested, you'll need to go back to last week's episode. And if you're just not interested in that sort of thing, then I certainly understand that. But the second part is I I think you're gonna find it very interesting. And check the chapter markers out so that you can go to that part of the episode and avoid the the survival game uh part. Uh now and I'm just gonna leave it at that. It's extremely interesting. There's uh a sound bite and then a listener participation activity. First time that's ever happened on the podcast. So uh, well, with that said, let's get started with the survival game. Well, here are the rankings of those objects that were salvaged from the plane crash. Before I list them, a bit of an explanation. Mid January is the coldest time of year in northern Canada. Well go figure. The first problem the survivors face is the preservation of body heat and the protection against its loss. This problem can be solved by building a fire, minimizing movement and exertion, using as much insulation as possible and constructing a shelter. The participants had just crash landed. Many individuals tend to overlook the enormous shock reaction this has on the human body, and the deaths of the pilot and co-pilot increase that shock. Decision making under such circumstances is extremely difficult. Such a situation requires a strong emphasis on the use of reasoning for making decisions and for reducing fear and panic. Shock would be shown in the survivors by feelings of helplessness, loneliness, hopelessness, and fear. These feelings have brought about more fatalities than perhaps any other cause in survival situations. Certainly the state of shock means the movement of the survivors should be at a minimum, and that an attempt to calm them should be made. Before taking off, a pilot has to file a flight plan which contains vital information such as the course, speed, estimated time of arrival, type of aircraft, and number of passengers. Search and rescue operations begin shortly after the failure of a plan to appear at its destination at the estimated time of arrival. The 20 miles to the nearest town is a long walk even under ideal conditions, particularly if one is not accustomed to walking such distances. In this situation, the walk is even more difficult due to shock, snow, dress, and water barriers. It would meet almost certain death from freezing and exhaustion. At temperatures of minus 25 to minus 40, the loss of body heat through exertion is a very serious matter. The ranking of the survivors' items, by the way, was made by Mark Wangvig, a former instructor in survival training for the Reconnaissance School of the 101st Division of the U.S. Army. Mr. Wanvig currently conducts wilderness survival training programs in the Minneapolis, Minnesota area. This survival simulation game is used in military training classrooms. Alright, scorekeeping time. So to do this, please list those 12 objects in vertical formation. You'll understand the reason for that. And you can go back to the previous episode, but you don't have to do that. I'll give them to you again one more time. So they are a ball of steel wool, a small axe, a loaded 45 caliber pistol, a can of Crisco shortening, newspapers, one per person, cigarette lighter, without fluid, an extra shirt and pants for each survivor, a 20 by 20 foot piece of heavy-duty canvas, a sectional air mat made of plastic, one quart of 100-proof whiskey, a compass, and a family-sized chocolate bar, one per person. So again, very quickly, a ball of steel wool, small axe, loaded 45 caliber pistol, can of Crisco shortening, newspapers, cigarette lighter, extra shirt and pants, 20x20 piece of heavy-duty canvas, air map made of plastic, a one-quart of 100-proof whiskey, a compass, and a family-sized chocolate bar. By listing those items either in their order of importance for survival or just simply putting, a numeral to indicate the most to the least. It doesn't really matter how you do it, but make sure there is a numeral to indicate that, because there's going to be another numeral beside each based on what Mark Wangvig discovered through experience are the order of importance from most to least. So here we go. Wherever you had cigarette lighter, that's number one. And remember, it was without fluid, and here's the explanation. The gravest danger facing the group is exposure to cold. The greatest need is for a source of warmth, and the second greatest need is for signaling devices. This makes building a fire the first order of business. Without matches, something is needed to produce sparks. And even without fluid, a cigarette lighter will be able to do that. So that was the most important. Second, that ball of steel wool. Why was it number two? Well, to make a fire, the survivors need a means of catching the sparks made by the cigarette lighter. This is the best substance for catching a spark and supporting a flame, even if the steel wool is a little wet. So ball of steel wool was number two. Number three, I don't think this will be much of a shock, that extra shirt and pants for each survivor. Besides adding warmth to the body, clothes can also be used for shelter, signaling, bedding, bandages, string when unraveled, and fuel for the fire. Well, this is the one that might surprise you. Number four, that can of Crisco shortening. It actually has many uses. A mirror-like signaling device can be made from the lid. After shining the lid with that steel wool, it will reflect sunlight and generate five to seven million candle power. If you're with me, you're not sure how bright that is. Well, according to this, this is bright enough to be seen beyond the horizon. While this could be limited somewhat by the trees, a member of the group could climb a tree and use the mirrored lid to signal search planes. If they had no other means of signaling than this, they would have a better than 80% chance of being rescued within the first day. There are other uses for that can of crystal shortening. It can be rubbed on exposed skin for protection against the cold. When melted into an oil, the shortening is helpful as fuel. When soaked into a piece of cloth, melted shortening will act like a candle. The empty cane is useful in melting snow for drinking water. And on that point, it is much safer to drink warmed water than to eat snow, since warm water will help retain body heat. Water is important due to dehydration, which will affect decision making. The can can also be useful as a cup. Now, number five, that 20 by 20 foot piece of canvas. The cold makes shelter absolutely necessary, and canvas would protect against wind and snow. Canvas is used, of course, in making tents. Spread on a frame made of trees, it could be used as a tent or a windscreen. It might also be used as a ground cover to keep the survivors dry. Its shape, when contrasted with the surrounding terrain, makes it an excellent signaling device. Number six, that small axe. Survivors need a constant supply of wood in order to maintain the fire. The axe would be useful for this as well as for clearing a sheltered campsite, cutting tree branches for ground insulation, and constructing a frame for the canvas tent. Oh, halfway through. Now, number seven, that family-sized chocolate bar, one per person. Chocolate will provide some food energy. Since it contains mostly carbohydrates, it supplies the energy without making digestive demands on the body. Number eight, newspapers, and again one per person. These are useful in starting a fire. They can also be used as insulation under clothing when rolled up and placed around a person's arms and legs. The newspaper can also be used as a verbal signaling device when rolled up in a megaphone shape. It could also provide reading material for recreation. Find that kind of interesting. But he's the expert. Number nine, that loaded forty-five caliber pistol. The pistol provides a sound signaling device. By the way, the international distress signal is three shots fired in rapid succession. There have been numerous cases of survivors going undetected because they were too weak to make a loud enough noise to attract attention. The butt of the pistol could be used as a hammer, and the powder from the shells will assist in fire building. By placing a small bit of cloth in a cartridge emptied of its bullet, one can start a fire by firing the gun at drywood on the ground. The pistol also has some serious disadvantages. Anger, frustration, impatience, irritability, and lapses of rationality may increase as the group awaits rescue. The availability of a lethal weapon is a danger to the group under those conditions. Although a pistol could be used in hunting, it would take an expert marksman to kill an animal with it. Then the animal would have to be transported to the crash site, which could prove difficult to impossible depending upon its size. Well, three more to go. That quart of 100 proof whiskey. The only uses of whiskey are as an aid in fire building and as a fuel for a torch, made by soaking a piece of clothing in that whiskey and attaching it to a tree branch. The empty bottle could be used for storing water. The danger of whiskey is that someone might drink it thinking it would bring warmth. Alcohol takes on the temperature to which it is exposed, and a drink of minus thirty degree Fahrenheit whiskey could freeze a person's esophagus and stomach. Alcohol also dilates the blood vessels in the skin, resulting in chilled blood being carried back to the heart, resulting in a very rapid loss of body heat. Thus a drunk person is more likely to get hypothermia than a sober person. 11. Because a compass might encourage someone to try to walk to the nearest town, it can be a dangerous item. Its only redeeming feature is that it can be used as a reflector of sunlight due to its glass top. And lastly, the sectional air map made of plastic. This is also among the least desirable of the items because it will encourage individuals to try to walk to the nearest town. Its only useful feature is as a ground cover to keep someone dry. Alright, so here's how you score this. So now, beside each item, you have two numerals. And what you need to do now is subtract one from the other. So if uh if one of them was a one and and also a four, well, for that one you would score three. And it's kind of like golf. The lower your final score, the better. Because if you stop and think about it, if you list them all in the correct order, the the difference between each of the two numbers would be zero. Well, zero times twelve is zero. So now go back and record the difference between the two numerals for each of the items, and that will give you your score. I didn't mention it at the time, but this is a really good activity for a curling team in the offseason because when it was described to you, I tried to encourage you to do it as a group and to come to consensus about the value of each of these items involves in an element of team dynamics as to you know who is going to lead the discussion based on perhaps shared experiences. So simulation games like this can have a really good benefit for team dynamics. So I hope you enjoyed the survival game. And the next time that you're in a plane crash, which I hope is never, of course, and you're in northern Canada and you have some of these items, well, you'll know what to do. So thanks for playing. It's by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, uh chief medical correspondent. And this one is subtitled How Hypnosis May Be More Real and Powerful Than You Think. Now, what's that got to do with sports and athletics? Well, here is the introduction. Most people might think hypnosis is just stage tricks, but the science tells a different story. Dr. Sanjay Gupta talks with Stanford's doctor David Spiegel about how clinical hypnosis may help with pain, anxiety, and bad habits. Now here's the interesting line. He also explains why elite athletes use it to improve focus and performance, and how you might be able to use it yourself. So obviously, it was that line about elite athlete. So here is the section of the podcast, and I certainly would encourage you to listen to the entire episode at some point. And hopefully, this will help you in your seeking best possible performance.

SPEAKER_01 17:52

Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention, Sanjay. Have you ever gotten so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and you enter the imagined world? That's what hypnosis is. It's believed in imagination. You don't judge it, you don't evaluate it, you just experience it. Right now, for example, you're sitting in a chair, you have sensations in parts of your body touching the chair, but I'm hoping that you weren't even aware of that until I mentioned it to you. Am I right about that? Yeah, you're right. If if I was wrong, we could just stop the interview now, you'd be already bored. So we naturally do it. We dissociate. That's the second part. So this absorption in the focus of attention. To do that, you dissociate, you put outside of conscious awareness things that would ordinarily be in consciousness to allow yourself to fully immerse yourself in the focus of your attention. And the third thing is that you tend to disconnect from your usual way of thinking about things. And we've seen this in the functional neuroimaging that we do, where three things happen in the brain when you go into a hypnotic state. The first is you reduce activity in the salience network. So you're just turning off the alarm and allowing yourself to experience things. You increase functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, particularly on the left, and the insula, you know, the little island of tissue in the frontal lobe that is has to do with mind-body connection. So you intensify your ability to control and perceive your body. And the third is inverse functional connectivity between the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate part of the default mode network. That's you know, the part of your brain when you're not thinking or doing anything in particular, uh, you're just kind of ruminating. And it tends to keep you on track sometimes, but it also can inhibit you. And so you're disconnecting from the part of your brain that says you should be doing this, things ought to go like that, and allowing yourself to try out being different.

SPEAKER_02 19:57

Aaron Powell You just drew a distinction, I think, uh, between hypnosis and meditation. I don't think that's right. Talk about that a little bit. These are two different things.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

They are. I mean, they're not unrelated, and uh there's neuroimaging evidence, for example, that in meditators over time reduce activity in the posterior cingulate cortex and part of the default mode network, which is where in hypnosis you can also inhibit activity. Meditation is about being, and hypnosis is about doing. So in meditation, you're taught to have open presence, to just don't try to change anything, just allow feelings, thoughts, and feelings flow through you like a storm passing by. It's a way of being, uh, which I admire. I think it's a wonderful tradition, but it's not a problem-solving tradition. It's in by definition, it isn't. With hypnosis, you're altering your state of focused attention, turning off the part of your brain that triggers this uh reactivity to something that is troubling you. Um, you're able to better control what's happening in your body.

SPEAKER_02 21:03

Can anyone be hypnotized?

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Uh no. Most children uh are very hypnotizable. You know, you call them in for dinner, they don't hear you. Um, but as we go through what are called formal operations in adolescence, where we start to value analysis over experience, um, which is part of maturation, some people lose some of that ability. And basically, in the adult population, about 20 percent are extraordinarily hypnotizable. They lose themselves in movies, they get so evolved in uh in a work project that they forget to go to dinner. They're all kinds of things, they just immerse themselves completely. About 60 percent are moderately hypnotizable. So they'll engage in intense experiences like that, and then they'll step back and wonder about it. And there's a group at the lower 20 percent who uh are uh just aren't hypnotizable, and they value thinking over. Overfeeling. But by the time you're 20, 21, the hypnotizability you have, and it can be low, medium, or high, is very stable.

SPEAKER_02 22:09

There's a thing called the Spiegel test, obviously named after you. I think one of the questions for a lot of people who are listening or watching is can I be hypnotized? Right. And about two-thirds of adults can be hypnotized, some more than others, as you mentioned. Is it overall an attribute to be hypnotizable? Is that saying something good about your brain?

SPEAKER_01 22:28

Uh yes, I would say it is. It it's a cognitive and affective flexibility. You can immerse yourself in things, get into them, enjoy them, but but then step back. And so uh it's a skill that people can use, but it can make trouble for you. If you become totally convinced that one more, you know, bit of pain in my chest means I'm having a heart attack every time it happens. You can lose yourself in that. You can believe it. You can sometimes get taken in easily by people. One thing I noticed about very hypnotizable people is that they're they're empaths. They quickly tune into the way other people are feeling and try to please them. Whereas uh low hypnotizables, nah, you know, it's I think they judge everything. So it defines a set of natural abilities to get mobilized that can be good things or sometimes problematic.

SPEAKER_02 23:24

Are some people just more genetically more hypnotizable than others?

SPEAKER_01 23:28

Yes. Um there is uh a um a genetic component to hypnotizability. In the dopamine metabolic pathway, um there is uh a heterozygous and a homozygous component to the to the dopamine um uh uh processing. If you're heterozygous, that is ideal for hypnotizability. So people, it may you maintain a sort of steady, relatively high level of dopamine, and um they tend to be more hypnotizable than those who are homozygous in either direction. There's also an experiential component, and it can either be a good one or a bad one. Uh children who have parents who engage them in imaginative involvements, who read them stories every night at bedtime, who who tended to encourage children to use their imagination that tend to be more hypnotizable as adults. But sadly, there's a bad one, and that is that children who have been mistreated or abused tend also to be very hypnotizable because they can't let go of that ability. They use it as a defense. And I've had patients who said that when my father would beat me or abuse me, I would just go to a mountain meadow full of wildflowers. And, you know, he's got my body, but he hasn't got me. So it for some, unfortunately, children, it's a defense mechanism as well.

SPEAKER_02 24:46

Yeah, I had a I gotta let that sit for a second. That I mean, a defense mechanism essentially was what the the the that sort of hypnotic state was for them.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

Aaron Powell Yeah, absolutely. And uh people will tell you this, you know, in a car accident, you know, time goes very slowly, you know, it took a couple seconds and it felt like half an hour. Soldiers in combat will do things uh under terrible duress that they may not even remember doing. They're in this kind of altered state too, intensely focused, everything else outside of awareness. And that's a hypnotic-like state as well. Can you hypnotize yourself? Uh yes, I've done it. Absolutely. Um and all hypnosis, Sanjay, is really self-hypnosis. What I do is teach people how to use an ability to the extent that they have it. And so you're conscious, you're aware of what's going on, but you're more narrowly focused. So in a hypnotic state, you're solving a problem, but you're putting aside other things that in ordinary consciousness you might be thinking about.

SPEAKER_02 25:51

I think I remember reading in one of your articles that you hypnotize yourself around shoulder pain as well.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

Yes, yes, that's right. Yeah, I had a uh recurrent dislocating shoulder. I eventually had a bank heart repair.

SPEAKER_02 26:04

But when you did this for yourself, can you just talk us through what did you do?

SPEAKER_01 26:09

Um I I have a very simple hypnotic induction. I look up top of your head. While looking up slowly, close your eyes, take a deep breath, let the breath out slowly through your mouth, let your eyes relax, but keep them closed, let your body float. And then I let one hand or the other float up in the air like a balloon, and that's a signal to myself that I'm ready to concentrate. And you can notice a kind of dissociation between your right hand floating up, your left hand comfortably sitting down. You're already experiencing a non-clinical ability that you have to change the way your body feels. And that means also I could imagine that I had a cooling pad on my right shoulder and let the cool, tingling numbness penetrate deeper and deeper and filter the hurt out of the pain. And I might imagine being somewhere that I felt good in a mountain lake or in a hot tub. And then I would come out very quickly by counting backwards from three to one on three, get ready, two with your eyelids closed, roll up your eyes, one, let your eyes open, and float back down, make a fist open, and that's the end of the exercise. It's that's the induction. That's it. That's it.

SPEAKER_02 27:27

So what you just talked us through, you were talking about for yourself, but that would be the same if somebody were to come to your office? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

It's no big deal. You don't have to count upstairs and downstairs. I differ with many of my colleagues about the concept of deepening. Um, you know, there are a lot of people who feel you got to talk for 10 or 15 minutes. If you've got the ability, you can go there in a flash. It's just a matter of having the structure for doing it. But what I do is I measure everybody's hypnotizability. So the first five to six minutes of my intervention clinically is to give a structured test of your hypnotizability, instruct people that their hand, if they pull it down, it'll flow right back up to the upright position. How much reinforcement do you have to give to get that? Does the right hand feel as if it's not as much a part of the body as the left hand? Then when you give a cutoff signal, touch the elbow, does the usual sensation of control return? Uh, did they respond to that cutoff? Did they have a sense of floating lightness or buoyancy in their hand and then elsewhere in the body? And so after that five minutes, I have a very clear idea of how hypnotizable people are and how to work with them based on their degree of hypnotizability.

SPEAKER_02 28:39

7,000 patients you say you have helped uh over your career. Is there a common type of patient? What are they most likely seeing you for?

SPEAKER_01 28:48

Commonly for problems like stress and anxiety, um, because it can they can very quickly learn to soothe and disconnect that sort of snowball effect of the reaction to the problem from what initiated it uh for pain. Um and so I resonated with your with your wonderful book um uh because it's very useful for pain control. We published a study in the Lancet um in 2000, randomized clinical trial, patients having things dreaded through their arteries, and we randomized them into three conditions: standard care, which meant press a button and get opioids into your bloodstream, that plus the friendly nurse providing emotional support, or that plus hypnosis. And the average pain ratings in the standard care group were seven out of ten, in the nursing support group were four out of ten, and in the hypnosis group one out of ten. Wow. And they were using half as much of the opioid injections. Now, Sanjay, if we published that and it was a drug that produced that, every hospital in the country would be using that drug now. Uh because it worked extremely well, it costs virtually nothing, and there are no side effects.

SPEAKER_02 29:59

Right.

SPEAKER_01 30:00

Uh, but there's also no big industry pushing it. And so um unfortunately, the evidence there is, it just isn't taken seriously because it can't be that quick and easy and safe, but it is.

SPEAKER_02 30:17

What about optimizing performance? Uh yes. Well, talk about Olympic athletes, for example, I think.

SPEAKER_01 30:23

You bet. Well, this wonderful figure skater Alisa from from Oakland, she does visualization. To me, that's all self-hypnosis. She said, I would just, before I did the routine, many times, I would just close my eyes and picture myself making every move I wanted to make, and she would do it. Um, Rory McElroy, who won the masters, he was frustrated for like seven years because at one point on one hole, I think the ball wound up in a tree somewhere. Yeah, I remember that. I remember that. He was humiliated. And and he kept doing it every year, and the same thing happened on that hole. Learned association. His brain thought, you know, here it's going to happen again. And the more you say, oh my God, I hope it doesn't, of course, the more it's likely to happen. He decided to get professional help from a from a hypnotist, and he won the masters. Um, there's a uh there's a book called Zen and the Art of Archery. An Irish sociologist figured out that the main difference between Zen archers and most archers is they say if you're focusing on the target, you're making a mistake. Focus on your relationship with the bow and arrow. And if your relationship is right, the arrow will go where it should go. And that's the thing with many professional athletes, they're so focused on the on the outcome and what it'll mean that they're actually distracting themselves from what matters, which is how they're relating to their body and getting it to do what they want it to do.

SPEAKER_02 31:52

I I think that really makes sense to me. Instead of thinking about the target for that archer, think about your relationship with the bow and arrow. And we're talking about archery specifically, but I feel like that applies to maybe many things in our life, you know.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

You're absolutely right. Focus on the process and not the the outcome.

Groceries & Balloons

A Amazing Round Of Golf

SPEAKER_00 32:16

Oh, and how many times have you heard focus on the process, not the outcome? Focus on the process, not the outcome. As uh Dr. Gupta and Dr. Spiegel talked about hypnosis and the power of the mind. It led me to something that we would sometimes do at high performance camps. An interesting activity. And we're going to do it together at this time. Now, if you are on your bike or if you're walking the dog, you're going to have to press pause or notice where this is on the chapter markers because you need to do it at home in a relatively quiet place. So here is that activity. So I want you to stand up and raise your arms at shoulder height. Palms down. So stand up, arms up at shoulder height, palms down, close your eyes. Follow my instructions very carefully. Think about what you feel as I give you the instructions. On your left wrist, I'm going to place a grocery bag. Preferably one of those old-fashioned grocery bags, the brown paper bags with the brown paper straps. I'm going to place that on your left wrist. So feel the bag on your left wrist. Into the bag, I'm going to carefully place two cans of soup. Regular-sized cans of soup. You may actually hear them as they are placed into the bottom of the bag. Along with the two cans of soup, I'm going to place one liter of milk. One liter of milk and two cans of soup. Then I'm going to add three bright yellow grapefruits. I'll place those into the bag with the milk and the soup. Then a bunch of bright orange carrots, along with the grapefruits, the milk, and the soup. And lastly, one of my favorite vegetables, I love making butternut squash soup, so I have found a medium-sized butternut squash joining the carrots, the grapefruits, the milk, and the soup. On your right wrist, I'm going to tie a large helium-filled red balloon. So feel me tie that string around your right wrist. With eyes still closed, look up and see that red balloon. Then I'm going to take a yellow helium-filled balloon and tie it on your right wrist. With eyes still closed, go look up and see the red and the yellow helium-filled balloon. Then I'm going to tie a green helium-filled balloon joining the yellow and the red. So you now have three helium-filled balloons tugging on your right wrist. And lastly, a blue helium-filled balloon. Feel me tie it on your right wrist, joining the green, the yellow, and the red. You've got a bag of groceries on your left wrist with soup, milk, grapefruits, carrots, and butternut squash, and four helium-filled balloons on your right wrist. On the count of three, get ready to open your eyes. Ready? One, two, three. Now when we did this as a group, it was quite amazing because I didn't say anything about moving your arms. And if we had a group of, say, twenty people, I can just about guarantee we would have ten or more with their left arm pointing down towards the floor and their right arm up towards the sky or the ceiling. And in some, the arms would be at just that regular level. But this is what Dr. Spiegel was talking about that if you immerse your mind in an activity, you can change the way your body responds. So we call that the groceries and the balloons. One more comment before we leave this, and I hope you have found it uh interesting and educational and hopefully helpful. I remember the story of the uh Air Force pilot who was shot down in Vietnam and was a prisoner of war for seven years. Now I'm paraphrasing, I think I've got it fairly accurately. And he was in solitary confinement for most of that time, and he made a conscious decision that he was not gonna die as a prisoner of war in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp. He was a golfer, and he decided every day he would play a round of golf. And so he would imagine every last detail of going to the golf course, getting in his vehicle, starting it up, closing the door, hearing the sound of the door closing, and his drive to the golf course, all those familiar sights and sounds, maybe even smells, as he drove the twenty-five minutes to the golf course. He imagined parking the car, closing the door, feeling and hearing his footsteps approach the locker room where he would change into his golfing gear, especially putting on his golf shoes. He would walk up to the pro shop and chat with the pro, and they would carry on a conversation about what was happening in the world of golf, or perhaps at the golf course itself. And then his playing partners would arrive, his three best friends, and they would talk about all sorts of things with family and work-related activity before it was their turn to approach the first T and T off. And when it was his turn, he would feel the ball and the T in his hand, look down the fairway, choose his spot on the T-box, place the T in the ball into the ground, step back, and choose his target line, feeling the practice swings, finally step up to the ball, focus on the club hitting the ball, swing, feel and hear the contact, and watch the ball as it landed in the fairway. When he approached his shot, it was a par four, he decided it was a seven-iron shot. So he would take out his seven iron, go through his pre-shot routine, and he would as he was walking to that shot, he would uh hear the the birds singing and the squirrels scampering across the grass. He'd noticed the grounds crew on an adjoining hall cutting the fairway. He could smell the freshly cut grass and hear the sound of the moor and wave to him. Yes, that was Charlie. He has been a groon's groundskeeper at the club for a long time. He would then strike the ball and it would land on the green close enough that perhaps two putts and he could par the hole. And he enjoyed his walk up to the green. After he set his bag down and got his putter, he lined up the putt, decided it was slightly a right to left, noticing the grain and the green. And he would see the ball go into the hole before he actually stroked the putt. And following what he saw in his mind's eye, he would execute the putt, stopping the ball just beyond the hole. And when it was his turn, he would tap it in for a par. And he would play every hole just like that. And then when the round was over, he would enjoy the camaraderie of a beverage and perhaps some lunch with his friends and enjoy their company and the ride home again, seeing all the familiar sounds and sights, arriving home to his family. He did that every day. And it took four hours because he did it in real time. He was an average golfer struggling to break a hundred. So he would shoot, you know, if it was a gr a really Good round, he would you know be in the high eighties or low nineties, but always keeping it under a hundred. And here's the interesting part. When he was finally freed and came back home, the one thing he couldn't wait to do was play a round of golf. He had not touched a golf club for seven years. He played that round of golf and he shot 75. Because you see, when he played his round of golf in the prisoner of war camp, he expected to make every shot. He knew his limitations. He wasn't gonna score a hole on one on every hole, but the drives always ended up on the short grass, the putts always were within a makeable distance, and he shot 75. Now, how was he able to do that? Well, his skills as a golfer hadn't changed, he hadn't learned anything new, his physical condition had obviously deteriorated, and yet because of the power of the mind and the attitude that went along with it, he was able to shoot seventy-five. And how often do we focus so much on technique and not nearly enough on the companion, and that's your brain, and the power that's locked in there. All you have to do is unlock it, and hopefully this will inspire you to consider exactly that. Well, first of all, thank you very much for joining me today, whether it was for the survival game and the second session on the power of the mind, but uh Dr. Gupta's uh Chasing Life podcast just caught my imagination and of course made the connection with so much of what we have talked about in the past. That it's great to uh have wonderful technical skills, but to fight off and defend and protect those skills against competitive breakdown, your greatest ally is the power of the mind, and that's really what this last section was all about. Well, wherever you are, it's certainly now into the month of May here in North America. My sailboat, time out, went into the water on Thursday. Sails are on, a little bit of cleaning to do, and we're ready to enjoy many, many hours on that lake that I talked about in the introduction, Lake Huron. Well, wherever you are, of course, my friends, please stay safe and don't forget that great North American philosopher Charlie Brown, don't focus too much on things that make you sad, because there are so many things that make you happy. Until next time.