MindShare: Beginnings

Just out of high school in 1971, I thought my future was set—sex, drugs and rock and roll.  What’s not to like. After half a year of nothingness, my dear mother said “You need to go do something with your life.” Well, I went and joined the Army.

Early on, I decided I wanted two things to make myself better: physical fitness and faith in God (what soldier wouldn’t want these given the Vietnam War was still raging). I started to work out with weights, and my parents had put faith into me all my life, so I carried that along, subdued.

I happened onto two learnings that provided me the path to a deeper understanding of myself and who I wanted to be. My Army roommate at the time was studying Silva Mind Control and he began teaching those techniques to me. I can best describe this as targeted meditation with self-programming as the goal.

I practiced this by going into a deep meditative state, creating a “personal workshop” and programming who, what and how I wanted to be thru active visualization. About the same time, I read a book titled “Psycho-Cybernetics” by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. This book speaks directly to the concepts of mental imaging and visualization to improve oneself. It provides concrete examples of people in various acts of life improving their situation through imagination of good outcomes.

One specific idea from that book tied all of this together and made it very real for me: the human nervous system cannot distinguish between an event vividly imagined and one actually experienced.

This same visualization technique has long been associated with elite athletes. Relaxing into the meditation, an Olympic sprinter would repeatedly visualize the race before it occurs—crossing the finish line first, hearing the cheers, feeling every sensation associated with the event. The more detailed and complete the imagined experience, the more real the visceral imprint. This process is continually reinforced as the event approaches and, in theory, the victorious outcome is programmed into the nervous system as though it had actually happened.

These two learnings initiated my journey and became the bedrock for self-exploration and evolution. In the Army, I became an Interrogator.  I learned Korean and Vietnamese, spending five years in South Korea. I also had the opportunity to teach and lead training programs for interrogation at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School.

Before I discuss interrogation further, let me make clear what an interrogation is not and what it is. It is not a method of torture—that is (was) unacceptable in the U.S. Army and specifically in my activity and teaching. It is a method of obtaining information from someone unwilling to provide it by assessing the person to create an interaction that facilitates disclosure.

I now had the desire to excel at my profession, and I began attending night school to obtain a degree in psychology. Psychology because of my deep interest in self-exploration and mental processes, and because it would fit perfectly with my military occupation.

I applied my studies to my teaching of interrogation and delved deeper into various interrogation techniques and methods. One corollary subject of particular interest to me was neurolinguistic programming (NLP), which I vigorously incorporated into my philosophy and teaching. NLP is a complex subject worth exploring, but I won't delve into it here.

Two critical skills came out of this experience and training: 1) a deep understanding of the dynamics of interpersonal interaction; 2) the ability to enter into another person’s experience on a visceral level of thought and feeling.

Now, one can say that is high EQ (emotional intelligence), and I would not argue. I came to think of the goal of interrogation as creating a kind of shared experience—a shared mind—with the interrogatee, to the extent that they would provide the information I was seeking. I eventually gave that idea a name: mind share.

This initial mind share became an integral part of who I was becoming, enabling me to develop deeper understandings of people, each person, and to fully engage with them from their perspective. In 1984, I decided to leave the Army and pursue a life in business. As I was preparing to leave college in 1988 with a degree in Systems Analysis, I realized I needed to confront a potential personal and professional issue.

My interrogation skills and this version of mind share could provide me with an unfair advantage in a workplace no matter how competitive the culture. So, I had to decide how I would use my unique skillset for the rest of my life, professionally and personally.