Paul Scheele is the top expert in the world on the topic of awakening the genius within, tapping the vast innate potential of the mind to attain more success in life. Having been doing this for over 30 years, he is an internationally known speaker and author. There are nearly two million of his books and recordings in people's hands around the world. Paul is the developer of programs and courses to stimulate personal and professional success.
Paul uses his specialized knowledge to deliver leading-edge, thought-provoking programs and helps people acquire information many times faster than through traditional methods. His programs share how to activate these rich resources within the mind and connect this natural power with spiritual wisdom, which is Paul's passion. His teachings are scientifically based and access the highest realms of human potential. Paul's programs contribute the critical knowledge that makes all the difference in attaining real success in today's ever changing and challenging world.
PAUL SCHEELE: Thanks a lot, Ric. It's great to be with you.
RIC THOMPSON: Paul, you are truly amazing, the things you teach, the concepts. It's really transformational in many ways. Probably the best place to start this off is to give people a bit of an overview, to give some context to what we're going to be talking about today. I think the best question to phrase this or set the tone right for you would be this: How do you define the genius potential that you feel we all possess?
PAUL SCHEELE: Everybody has heard the idea that we probably only function at about 10% of the brain's true potential. When I think about genius potential, I'm really talking about that untapped mental resource. It enables us to read and absorb new information at tremendously accelerated rates. I've created a program called PhotoReading and have trained trainers to teach it all over the world.
The genius potential enables us to heal quickly if we're sick. It allows us to be healthy and relaxed as others are all stressed out around us. It gives us the ability to generate creative new options to problems that have plagued us. Really, if you think about what it would be worth to you to maintain positive relationships instead of getting into conflict with others, especially as a businessperson, my gosh!, it's amazing.
We all know people who burn bridges all the time. Why don't we use that genius capacity to build bridges, to expand our network, to be able to use the power and resource of others to facilitate the work that we're doing in our business? What would it be worth to have an extra burst of energy to overcome some hurdle right when you need it most?
What about having a better memory, being able to live at your ideal weight, or be able to wake up in the morning super-charged? These are the abilities, this genius potential, that's really within us. If we cut our hand, the hand heals. At the cellular level there's a brilliance that's able to take over and do work for us. This is work that's way beyond what our conscious mind can even begin to tap into or perceive. It's power that our non-conscious mind contains.
As business people we know we need all the resources when the pressure is on; we've got to perform as an entrepreneur. Your paycheck isn't set by someone else; it's set by you. Unless we have a secret ally working for us behind the scenes, life can be pretty stressed out. One of the great thinkers, problem solvers, inventors of our era was a doctor, Buckminster Fuller. He was the one who created the geodesic dome. You see it at Epcot Center, that big ball there.
He did a whole lot more than that, but he wrote the foreword to Maria Montessori's book. What he said is that out of 10,000 children born in the world, 9,999 of them will have been systematically de-geniused by the time they reach the fifth grade, and it will happen because of the efforts of well-intentioned, well-meaning adults. Why? Because those adults told us to sit down, be quiet, pay attention, and don't talk with anybody else-that's cheating.
We call it collaboration now, but then they called it cheating. What it does is it actually shuts down the ability to explore the world and discover that our brains can interact with the world and bring forth pure genius abilities. What I've been privileged to spend my professional life doing, Ric, is to really focus on creating innovative ways for people to reignite, recapture, reclaim the genius potential that's within us all.
RIC THOMPSON: That's fantastic. As you tapped into here, this whole area of human potential is massive and it is amazing. What stops us as individuals from really getting into this and being able to use it every day?
PAUL SCHEELE: In a single word, the easiest way to answer that is this. What stops us is habit, unconscious habituated behaviors. What's really something about these habits that we need to understand is that there are three laws of how things operate in the universe. There are a bunch of laws, but three that I like to focus on relative to your personal power and the power of your mind.
The first is entropy. Entropy is everything becoming more random. If you didn't take care of your house, after 50 years the house would be practically destroyed. What we do is we use negentropy; we put energy into the system to keep it from going more random. That's why we eat well. That's why we exercise. That's why we take care of ourselves. It's to overcome the forces of entropy. While those two are going on, there's a third power that's in place, as well.
That's the law of equilibrium, which is the attempt to keep everything the same. You may have heard the phrase-it's a famous phrase in French-'plus ca change, plus c'est le meme chose', which is 'the more things change, the more they stay the same'. If you've ever had this idea of, "No matter what I do, I just can't seem to make any progress on this thing," or "I've tried a million things, and it's still in place. I've still got this problem that I haven't been able to deal with," really, virtually everything that we do on a daily basis is habit.
We have habituated ways of speaking, walking, eating, working and everything. Habits really do make our lives easier, but they also hold the potential to be our greatest downfall. Once a habit is formed, the brain actually hardwires itself. It sprays itself down with neuro-chemicals to keep those habits, those grooves, in place. There is an area in our brain called the hippocampus, which is designed to keep things going and keep equilibrium happening.
Even though you make a New Year's resolution, "I'm going to change this thing," simultaneously there is a habituated law that says, "No, you're not. It's going to stay the same." We can't ever really change a habit, and this is key to what we're talking about today. If you focus your energy on not doing something, what you're really doing is you're putting more energy into that thing. Are you going to avoid it? No, you're going to be thinking about it and reinforcing it.
What we reinforce, we get more of. It's a law in management we understand; you get more of what you reinforce. How do we start developing some other results if this is all going on? Really, what we have to do is we have to start creating new habits. Don't focus on breaking the old one; focus on creating the new one. If you have a habit of thinking, "Oh, my gosh! This is so hard. I'm never going to be able to do this," you have to start changing those voices.
There are three voices that are in our heads all the time. There's a voice of judgment, a voice of cynicism, and a voice of fear. Unless we're confronting those with new voices, putting new voices in there that are supportive of the outcomes that you want, what you're going to do is you're going to abort; you're going to say, "No, I can't do this." It comes from some fascinating studies on hypnosis, and maybe we'll be able to get into that as we talk here.
RIC THOMPSON: Great. Let's say that I'm trying to create a new habit. At the end of the day, I want new outcomes for myself. What's the fastest, easiest way to move in that right direction?
PAUL SCHEELE: If you think about the brain as having two sets of instructions, one set of instructions is like the operating system of the brain. It's what keeps everything going. You can lay back, not think about it, and your body will continue to breathe whether you think about it or not. There is a lot of programming that's in there that's based on the operating system.
The operating system of the brain runs on four-part code. It is visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory, which are essentially the five senses. Everything in your brain is coded with these particular components of the operating system. All your software is created on that. In other words, when you decide to do something, you have what we call a decision-making strategy.
There's a sequence of representations that your mind will run in order for you to get to a particular end result. You have these habit patterns that are set on these codes. You have strategies for learning; that's where the name of my company came from, Learning Strategies Corporation. You have strategies for doing math and strategies for spelling, for example. Some of us are great spellers, and some of us are lousy spellers, and it all has to do with a difference in the types of strategies that we're using.
If you have a strategy in spelling that is auditory, then you'll try to sound it out. You'll create a picture of what the word looks like or how it's spelled based on the way it sounds. You'll continually screw up if that's your strategy. We get hardwired for that early on. The only really good strategy for spelling is visual. You have to have a picture of it in your mind. I mentioned this idea of hypnosis a little while ago.
At age 19, I was trained as a professional hypnotist, and I was one of the first certified master practitioners of neurolinguistic programming in the world. At the time I was trained, there were only 70 of us; now there are close to a million. The idea is that if you want to do something now, if you really want to get a different result right away, you have to interact with the software of your brain, actually play with the codes that are being used to generate the results that you want.
You've probably heard, Ric, that it takes 21 days to establish a new habit. That's based on the idea of psychocybernetics, but the truth is that you can install a new habit almost instantaneously. When I did individual consultations using hypnosis and NLP for many, many years in the early days of my business, I would say, "We're only going to do three sessions." What I ended up doing is creating a line of audio products called Paraliminal recordings, which are designed to get the same kinds of results.
Now it's on a plug-and-play; you listen to it and it works for you right there. Essentially what we're doing is we're overcoming the self-defeating habits that are in place that are actually hypnotic trances. We're awakening you from those trances by giving you these new options, these new possibilities so that your brain can take hold of these new behavior patterns and start running with them right away. Take, for example, the idea of procrastination.
People say, "I procrastinate. It's terrible. I can't get things done. I really hate that about me." Really, what it is is a strategy of prioritization. You're putting off something that's less important for something that's more immediate. That's a great strategy, except the things that you put off never get done. What we need to be able to do is drive a priority above everything else. If you look at dysfunctional psychology, that's called a compulsion.
What if you could push a button and install a temporary compulsion to do something that's contextualized? "I have this thing I have to do." "I have to get this paper done." "I have to get this proposal out." "I have to prepare this presentation." If you could just push a button and make that happen, wouldn't that be cool? Literally without effort, you'd find yourself spontaneously doing what needed to be done, everything else aside. This is the thing you're going to do.
That's exactly what I created using hypnosis and neurolinguistic programming in this technology called Paraliminals. I created a recording called Get Around To It. Literally, that's exactly what you do. I remember one of the people who I shared this with before actually publishing it was a dive instructor. She had a lot of filing to do; for over two years of teaching, she hadn't done any of it.
She listened to this recording before going to bed. In the morning, she woke up ready to do all the filing, but she couldn't find any of the piles anywhere. They were all gone. She thought, "Where in the heck did all those go?" She looked in her file cabinet, and they were all filed already. She had woken up at 2:30 in the morning, did all the filing, went back to sleep, and forgotten that she had actually done it.
Talk about powerful; we're talking about working at a level of consciousness that once you decide, "This is what I want to have done," your brain can create that habit almost instantaneously. Isn't that fun?
RIC THOMPSON: That's incredible. Of course, I want to comment here that Liz and I from time to time definitely tap into the Paraliminals. We have them here, and they're very cool. Let me dig into some of the things you mentioned here, just to get a little clearer. You were talking about strategies, and I think your first example was actually about learning how to spell. If your strategy was based upon auditory, you were going to have problems because it's more of a visual-type thing.
PAUL SCHEELE: Do you want me to give an example?
RIC THOMPSON: Yes, would you give me an example? Let's dig into this a little bit.
PAUL SCHEELE: Spell Albuquerque for me.
RIC THOMPSON: Oh, Lord!
PAUL SCHEELE: Don't look it up. Just tell me. Give it your best shot. Albuquerque. Go ahead.
RIC THOMPSON: No shame here! Albuquerque. A-L-B-U-R-Q… You lost me. I'm trying to sound it out, but I can't do it.
PAUL SCHEELE: Exactly. What we do is we go to sound it out. You've got A-L-B-U-R-Q-U, and that was the end of it, so that wasn't quite it. When you try to sound it out, what you do is you go to phonetics, you sound it out, and then you look up and you try to get a picture of it. You can see the picture wasn't complete, but you know there's a Q-U in there, and maybe a couple of them.
I'll give you an example. My first son was in first grade and came home and said, "Dad, guess what I can spell?" I said, "What, sweetie?" He said, "I can spell people." I said, "Wow! Ben, that's great!" Spell it for me." He said, "P-E-O-P-E-L." I said, "Wow! That is so cool. You've done such a great job. You've almost got it perfect. Nice going. Now, can you see a picture of that in your mind?"
What he did instantly is he looked up to the ceiling. The movements of the eyes looking up is gaining access to visual information. He said, "Yes." I said, "Good. Spell it backwards." He said, "E-L-P-O-E-P." I said, "Great. Now spell it forwards, and he said, "P-E-O-P-L-E." Guess what? That little kid was always in the spelling bee from then on. He was always the one champion within his class who would move on to the next area.
That's because he was able to see the picture of the word and then spell it from the picture. My second son, John, came home-I think he was in second grade-and said, "Dad, guess what I can spell?" I just love it when they come and say that kind of thing to me. I said, "What, John? What's the word?" He said, "Thanksgiving." I said, "Wow! Cool! Spell it."
He spelled it perfectly, and I said, "Now can you see it in your mind?" He looked up to the ceiling, just like his brother had, and said, "Yes, I can." I said, "Start with the 's' in the middle and spell one letter out, first left, then right, then left, then right, all the way to the end of the word. "S-K-G-N-I…" and he did it from the picture in his mind. He could spell it backwards; he could spell it forwards.
That's a visual strategy. When I came home and said to my dad, "Can you review this paper for me?" he said, "That's not how you spell Wednesday." I said, "It's not?" He said, "No, sound it out." I said, "I did. W-E-N-S-D-A-Y." "No," he said, "sound it out. Wednesday." Wednesday? I've never heard anybody say Wednesday before. This is the thing, getting to the bigger picture here.
When you have a fixed image in your mind that's not working, what you need to do is chunk it down. With Albuquerque, do it this way. You see three chunks in your mind. The first chunk is A-L-B-U, so I write it out on a flip chart and have people see it. Don't sound it out. See the picture of that. Close your eyes, see the picture, open your eyes, look at the words, close your eyes, and see the picture in your mind.
The second chunk is Q-U-E-R. See that in your mind so you could spell it backwards, R-E-U-Q just as well as you could spell it forwards. Now see the third chunk in your mind, Q-U-E. You can see what the middle letter is. It's 'U', and you can see it right there. I cover up the flip chart and say, "Now spell it backwards," and they say, "E-U-Q-R-E-U-Q-U-B-L-A." If they do it visually, they've got it. "Now spell it forwards," and they say, "A-L-B-U-Q-U-E-R-Q-U-E, Albuquerque."
What happens for us is we abort. We say, "I can't do this," because the strategy we're working on doesn't work. The moment you say, "I can't do this," what we usually do is to cover ourselves is we'll feign incapacity. We'll claim that we're just failures at that, that we're not brilliant at that. What we'll say is, "I'm a lousy speller," which is basically a stop sign from people saying, "You've got to forgive me, because I'm learning-disabled here."
Where would we ever get that idea? We're in a classroom. The teacher has one teaching style, and he's got 30 students in the classroom. Each one of the students in the classroom probably has a unique learning style. With one teaching style and 30 learning styles, what are you going to get? A bell curve, which is a normal distribution: 20% are going to get it, 20% aren't going to get it, and 60% in the middle are going to be all over the place, some getting it and some not getting it as much.
That's a bell curve, a normal distribution. If you agree to that and you're a teacher, then if somebody doesn't learn, what do you figure? That you're at that end of the bell curve, you're learning disabled. I don't say as a teacher, "I'm teaching-disabled." You have a unique learning style, you're in my classroom, and you didn't learn like everybody else. I don't say, "It must be something I'm doing." I immediately blame you for it, and I say, "You're broken."
People can't be broken. You're a genius; it just isn't being expressed there. Why? Because we're quick to accept the negative suggestion, "I can't do it; therefore, I'm a failure." As a result, that's the habit of mind, that negative thinking, that internal dialogue, which keeps this inability in place. Now as a business person, take the idea of, "You've got to make cold calls. You've got to promote yourself in business." What if you're reluctant to pick up that phone and make a call?
"I just don't like making calls. I'm just not a marketing-type person. I'm not a good salesperson. I'm a technical person." Baloney! It's the same thing as 'I'm a lousy speller'; you're got to get over yourself. As an entrepreneur, you've got to do it all. Until you can afford to hire people who can do it better than you and who love to do it, you've got to do it all. That means you've got to get over your weak self and start building that potential within yourself.
Say to your mind, "Bring this capacity forward. This is what I need to do." Quit self-sabotaging. Overcome it. I have a recording called Automatic Pilot, which is about overcoming self-sabotage. That's the idea. If it's something new that you have to learn to do, I've got a recording called Personal Genius. It just allows you to learn anything much more easily than you might have ever believed possible.
RIC THOMPSON: That's some fantastic stuff. I'm very grateful for you tying that back into business. You see that every day, don't you, people pigeonholing themselves as to what they can do, what they can't do, and avoiding certain activities because they feel they're not good at them?
PAUL SCHEELE: Yes. Imagine me here. I'm 19 years old. I've been asked to give a presentation for a youth group at a synagogue in Minneapolis, and I'm going to do a demonstration of hypnosis. I didn't like public speaking, first of all. My teacher, who had trained me, asked me to give this because she wasn't well. She was basically turning all of the business over to me at that time.
Here I was, a biological sciences student, and now I'm going to go spend Thursday evening giving a presentation to a youth group. I said to one kid, who was in a trance state, on stage with me, "Your foot's glued to the floor. You can try to move it, but you can't." Literally, he was frozen. His other foot could move, but the one couldn't move. In order to get his foot to move, he had to literally take his shoe off. Then he could move because his shoe was glued to the floor.
I was watching this thinking, "My gosh! This really works! Wow! Isn't that something? Aren't I powerful?" Then I said to him, "You can try to tell me your name, but you've forgotten your name. Try to tell me your name. You can't do it." He literally could not speak. He couldn't speak his own name. At that instant, I said, "That's it. We are taking perfectly reasonable resources of mind and we're throwing them out because we accept the words 'I can't'. We're doing this to ourselves all the time.
Once you agree and accept that you cannot do something, guess what? There's a part of the brain that will abort before you initiate the action. They did MRI studies of a brain with a posthypnotic suggestion of not being able to do something, not being able to remember something. As soon as the cascade of firings in the brain happened, it stopped at this certain point and then receded; whereas once that suggestion was removed and the person was asked to remember the thing that they couldn't remember before, at that point it continued.
That energy went all the way through the rest of the brain; they accessed the information, and they were able to say it. What they found is this abort mechanism in the brain prevents us-it's probably a protection mechanism; 'don't do what you can't'-and keeps us from getting into something that would be problematic for us. If it's not problematic and it's just an ego-thing, a fear thing, you've got to get over it. That's the key to what we're talking about here.
RIC THOMPSON: What are some good tips and tricks here to get around these obstacles, to help avoid the 'I can't' trap?
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