1 - intro - module 2 - dana & greg - teleclass - transcript

Teleclass Transcript Cloe Madanes & Mark Peysha06/23/10

MP: All right. Welcome everyone to the Teleclass. We’re very excited to get started with you guys today. Today we’re going to talk about another core strategy, Megastrategy of strategic intervention. And again, when it comes to being effective with people, these Megastrategies are like the kings to the kingdom. So basically, if you could take one of these strategies and get really good at it, then you will be 80 percent of the way there. There are some schools of coaching that basically take one Megastrategy and focus on it and you could build an entire practice off of it. So Cloe and I have spent thousands of hours analyzing and understanding and doing successful interventions. And when it comes to an intervention you could – sometimes you will be looking at what someone’s done, what would for instance Tony did and it seemed so simple it’s hard to believe that it’s really effective.

And what it comes down to is these core strategies are the strength that make strategies work. So if you can be very good at expanding the unit or using metaphor, then that’s actually the muscle that you use as an interventionist that creates the change. And so if you could just get good even in just one of these, then you can come to a situation where you need to solve a problem or communicate more effectively and you’ll have a half a dozen things at your fingertips that you can use and be very resourceful. And when you can do, use a mega strategy then you can actually take almost anything as the ingredient of the intervention and make it work. So, every week if you can just implement one of these core strategies that we talked about, and do you know, they’re highly compatible with many situations and you should do it when you can.

So, today’s session is on Tony’s work with Dana and Greg and specifically with the megastrategy that we called the Elevation Strategy. And the principle is pretty simple, when someone comes to you with a problem, there is always an emotional component to the problem. And part of the problem is that the emotional state that the person comes to you in where that they’re in when they’re dealing with that problem. They might be feeling frustrated or defeated or even afraid to hope for things that they want. And now, we live in a culture wherein establishment will tell you that if you’re feeling down, you should take a pill, or that you’re supposed to do some form of chemical or something like that. And so we as interventionists, we don’t believed in faddism as a long term solution and studies are proving that it’s not often that it’s not the chemicals in the pills that are actually working; it’s actually the beliefs of the persons taking on a solution focus.

So one of the keys that you want to do in any intervention is to be able to elevate the person to a higher level of intent and motivation. So when someone comes to you and they’re frustrated, and they reveal to you the source of their frustration is for instance toward the relationships, with a spouse, or with a child or co-worker, one thing you’re going to have to be able to do is to elevate the person to a higher level of thinking and a higher level of resourcefulness. So if you think about it, it makes sense. What leader doesn’t know how to elevate the minds and intentions of others? So the strategy is really important.

And sometime you just use elevation strategy in order to create an opportunity in the intervention in order to get someone to make a decision. So, once we talk about Tony’s

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methodology for doing interventions – and we’ll talk about these from the next module for Seven Master Steps – you’ll see that there is a time in every single intervention to use the elevation strategy. But many times, simply elevating the person to a higher level intention makes the problem get resolved.

In the case of today’s film, Dana stood up to ask for Tony’s help with his supposedly chronic problem, on Greg’s part and Greg had had it his whole life. And many people, if they’re trying to solve this problem would start getting into the knitty-gritty details of their sex life and sex therapists will bring out the little dolls and talk about the anatomy. And instead, Tony approached it in a completely different way. He refrained the problem as the universal problem of having a higher level of intent and he helped Greg to integrate his level of intent so that his lower levels of behavior – you know, where Greg suffers from fear, panic, and defensiveness – would be integrated with his higher level of behavior where he felt his drive to be integrated and to have love and gratitude in contribution to others and to connect with others. And so by taking Greg from the level of problems to the level of solutions, which is spiritual growth, Tony was able to solve the chronic sex problem without even talking about sex. And so that’s pretty amazing and it shows you what you can accomplish with this strategy. And if you can do that with a lifelong sexual problem, you can apply it to a lot of different situations.

So now in a few minutes, we’re going to go through some examples of the elevation strategy, how they work and some examples from Cloe’s work and finally we’ll get you some very concrete ways to use the elevation strategy in any situation. But first I want to make sure that we go over one of the key concepts from the film which is “The Four Dimension of Spiritual Development”. And this is an intervention by Cloe, and Cloe would you like to describe that?

CM: Yes. As I began to work with more and more difficult problems and more problems having to do with some conflicts including violent behavior, I realized that I wanted to integrate my concept of spirituality into my work. I am not a spiritual person in the sense of any orthodox belief. I’m a spiritual person in the sense that I believe in compassion and contribution and in doing good to others. So I was thinking about how people in families and general people in their lives gets stuck at low levels of spirituality and how is it possible to move them to higher levels.

And I came up with the idea that there are four levels of spiritual development and one leads to the next or can lead to the next or a person can get stuck at a certain level. So, I know that I’ve described this in the film but I want to explain it a little better because I believe that it’s a wonderful concept to guide you in coaching and strategic intervention as to what should be your next step with someone.

So, at the lowest level of spirituality, people are focused on the idea of power and control. The person wants to control their environment. They want to have power over other people. They want to dominate and control. And sometimes you can see that an individual is stuck at this level, sometimes you can see a whole family stuck at the level of their main focus is to dominate each other. They’re struggling in terms of who has



more power over whom. And you can find a whole organization, a company that is stuck at this level also.

So this occurs at the individual level, then the family level, and the social system level and the way that you can tell that people are stuck here is when they make comments like “He’s trying to dominate me”, or “She’s a control freak”, “He has to know all the time what’s going to happen next”, “He lives by the clock”, “He has to have his way”, or “There’s no way.” And you can also tell by the physiology of the person. The people are very tensed and their metaphors have to do with battles and war and domination and there is a certain overlap with the idea in the Six Human Needs of certainty. So often people that are stuck in dominating and controlling their environment and others are also very focused on certainty. They have to know at all times what’s going to happen next because that’s a form of control and domination. And so when you are working with people and you feel that they’re stuck at this level, you need to do your best to move them to the second higher level of spirituality which is the desire to be loved. And the desire to be loved is somewhat higher than the desire – it’s quite a bit higher than the desire to dominate and control so at this level when people are focused in how they can be loved, their language has to do with “My needs are not met”, “I need more”, “I want more.” They seem to always be focused on desire, on wants. “If I could only have the ski vacation”, “If I can only have the new car,” their focus is often very much on material possessions that represent for them to be loved. They’re focused on what they can get. “If I could only get that raise or get that higher position.” And again individuals, families and larger organizations can be focused at this level.

But this a higher level than wanting to dominate and control so if you’re working with people who feel that – where you feel that they stuck in domination and control, you begin to talk to them about how their real need underlying the need to dominate is the need to be loved, and how we all we want to be love and how do they want to be love in particular, how would they know if they’re loved? And you stir them away from materialism as a form of love and into one thing to be loved by others which means a give and take, which means understanding others and how to help others in ways that will lead to be loved.

Now if people can consult with you when you feel that they’re stuck in this desire to be loved than often the desire to be loved takes the form of eating disorders and drug addiction because it’s people who want to take in everything and often they want to take it in physically so there’s not enough food that is satisfying, there is not enough drugs that are satisfying. It’s all about what they can get.

So when people are stuck at this level you want to be move them to a higher spiritual level which is the need to give love, to give love to others. And again you can observe this in a individual, in a family or in a organization where the primary form of spirituality is expressed by wanting to give and of course this a higher level and when you’re working with a person that you feel is stuck and wanting to be loved, you have to move them to wanting to give love. And so you talk about the importance and the satisfaction of giving to others and giving to others materially but also emotionally, spiritually, giving



of one’s self, contributing to others. So this level, the level of wanting to give love is similar in the Six Human Needs to the level of contribution where we always try to move people to include contribution as an important human need which is to give to others, to give outside yourself.

And now the pitfall here when people get stuck in the need to give love is that they can become so focused in the group that they are trying to help that they are forgetting their own situation, the people that are closer to them. They are just so focused in contribution and because contribution is so satisfying, they can become quite full of themselves not in a bad way but forgetting their most important, more intimate relationships because they focus so much on others. So if this is the case you have to move them to what I consider is the higher spiritual level, the fourth level which is when people are focused in their need or the desire to repent and to forgive.

We all have things that we have done wrong and the need to repent for the wrong that we done to others and we all have things that were done wrong to us and the need to forgive for those wrongs. And so at this level, you want to move people back into their primary relationship and to think about who they need to forgive and what they need to repent for and you guide them to acts of apology and reparation. And so these four levels and this fourth level is very important, that you should also when people are stuck at this level, repentance and forgiveness, they can become like a monk in a cave. So at this point when people are completely stuck at this level of spirituality for their full of repentance and their full of forgiveness, you want to move them back to the first level to the lower level where they want to dominate and control their environment or they can become completely out of touch with the reality of the environment.

For example, you want them to focus back on the material needs of eating and having a place to sleep and working, and so on. So this works likes a spiral where you move people from one level to a higher level and when you reach the highest level its spiral’s back to the first one, to the need to dominate and control. And so what is nice about this is that it’s like a map of how to go from one place to another constantly moving people to a higher spiritual level.

MP: What I love about it is that it’s step by step. So if someone is in the phase of they need to dominate and control, you don’t go to them and say, “Listen, you need to repent and forgive,” because they’re not there yet. And basically, all of us, we have games; we have ways that we set up the game that we play on it.

CM: No, but wait Mark. Sorry but you have to go when people are stuck in domination and control you can’t skip other way to repent.

MP: Exactly.

CM: You have to go first to being love.

MP: That’s right and that’s what’s really so useful about these four stages, is that it can



make you very quickly pick up on what kind of, what’s preoccupation of a person or a family or a group. And you can move them to the next level up and if you move, if you try to skip a level they might completely disassociate, they won’t get it at all.

CM: Right.

MP: Because it’s very related. So it’s just like if someone is focused on controlling their environment, at certain point there’s only so much you can get, so much you can accomplish by controlling the environment. At some point, you’re going to start caring about something you’ve probably been repressing which is being love by other people. And probably at some point you thought that controlling the environment would bring love and approval and make things okay. But instead, in this case, you’d be guiding the person to the next level which is saying you know, making them to realize that.

And also when you have love then you care less about controlling the environment. Every little detail doesn’t matter as much because you have love. Love permeates and love takes care of you even if in every detail that’s right. So that’s how these four stuffs are really great in that way and that each one kind of answers the questions that are asked by the previous stage. Does that make sense?

CM: Yes. And it’s important just to realize that this as if you were talking Mark. For example when you have your relationship in a couple, it’s so important for them to be at the same level. For example, something that you typically observed is let’s say it’s a couple with young children, so the husband maybe very focused on domination and control because he has needs to get ahead in the world, he has to provide for the family, he is concerned about whether he is going to be able to provide and so he’s out there trying to control the environment. With little children at that moment the wife is probably very focused on the need to be loved, because it’s a whole novelty of little children and how much love little children can give you. And if she doesn’t understand that he’s at the stage of dominating and controlling and there is like a terrible, emotional distances, spiritual distance that happens in the same way the husband doesn’t understand that he at this moment is focused on domination and control that his wife needs love because she has to give so much to the children she has to be fed that love. And so these are very useful also in helping people to get on the same page.

MP: That’s great. So while you’re doing the elevation strategy you basically have a little bit of a road map and that you understand what phase is, and off course this happened with Greg as well in the film is that his primary issues, the intimacy issues had a lot to do with control and losing control.

CM: And totally he couldn’t understand they must need to be loved.

MP: Yep, and he was stuck at that pretty where he couldn’t, he felt that he couldn’t give love, because he was all about control and losing control. And that build up to love and then of course once you feel like you have love the question is, “So how can I give it?” So that’s kind of the end of the next step. And so and likewise at that point once you



have love and you’re giving love the next step is to really bring it home and kind of fix the places where you may have resentments or pains or places where their relationships were broken and repair them by – through forgiveness.

CM: That’s right when you’ve experienced receiving love and giving love, you can forgive the people that have not loved you properly or you can forgive yourself also and repent.

MP: Great.

CM: All right.

MP: So, let’s talk about some examples of ways you used the elevation strategy in different situations.

CM: Okay. So, the first one that I want to talk about is what I’ve called ‘the riches of the poor.’ And this is actually a universal strategy that you can use in many different kinds of cases. But in this case, in the example that I’m going to give you, I used to do it on actually very poor family. They came to my institute when I was in Washington DC, and the way that I spent most of my life teaching is that I am behind the one-way-mirror so that I can see through the glass into the therapy room where there’s a therapist with a family and I’m behind the mirror listening and videotaping and usually with a group of therapists that are students and I call this therapist on the phone with instructions and so on.

And so in this case it was a family that came in and a very poor family. The father had worked his entire life. They had five children. Their two youngest were still teenagers and they had three adult children they were all very good people. The father had worked all his life as a maintenance man or a janitor or something like that and then at the time of a recession in Washington DC, he was laid off even though he was well-liked by everybody and he was a good worker and so on.

And he couldn’t find work and at the time that they came in the family was on food stamps and I could tell that this man was so humiliated by this situation. Coincidentally, with his losing his job, the wife had become very sick. She had MS so when they came into the room, basically the father and the oldest son were carrying her because she could hardly walk. And they said that they wanted to consult about two teenage children that were fighting with each other, that were disrespectful with their mother, that it was clear that Dad was not the issue. The issue was the deep pain and the shame that the father felt and that consequently the whole family felt because they were unwell-fed, they were on food stamps and this had never happened before in the family’s history and also because of the injustice, the obvious injustice of this situation that a man who had worked hard all his life would find himself like this. And often poverty is one of the most unfair, unjust situations of all, especially when it strikes someone like a man who was so honest and had worked so hard.



So we talked about this and we could tell how depressed the emotion in the family was and it was if the mother had interjected all the father’s pain and had become ill. So, I called the therapist on the Intercom and I said, “We have to change this focus away from the pain and the injustice of poverty. And you need to tell them that wealth is not just material possessions, that to be rich is not just to have money or objects, that the more important ways to be rich are other ways and say that you want to go around the circle and ask each one how this family is very wealthy, in ways that are worth much more than money and much more than material possessions.”

So the therapist did this and everybody wanted to talk and everybody contributed. It was very moving because one of them said that they were rich in their spirituality, another one said in their faith, another one said that they were rich because they were so generous, because even when they had so little, they shared everything they have and they said people who had less than them and they always donated at the church. And then they talked about how they were rich because they had so much love for each other. And they were rich because the parents after like 30 years of marriage were still together and you could see the children brighten up immediately at this conversation and the mother who had seemed so frail began to straighten up in her chair. And this is really all that we did. The children actually spontaneously apologized for their bad behavior at that point so when they came back for the second time, the mother was walking completely normally, their family life was fine and one of the older sons for the first time was able to tell the parents that he was gay, which he was always had been afraid of the parent’s rejection and the parents accepted this very wisely and very warmly.

So this is a very simple way of elevating people so that they can understand what true wealth is, what true richness is and for different people is different things. I always say that I’m very rich because I have nine grandchildren so I’m rich in grandchildren because they’re much more important than money.

MP: You know, people tend to have such correlation between their external circumstances and their internal feelings and so they often do feel like the external circumstance are unjust and especially these days, you’ll come across people who are struggling with their finances or with job lose and it sometimes feel that there’s so little that you can do for someone if you’re dealing with the material issue. But the truth is that what people are really striving for is to meet their Six Human Needs and those are always available no matter what the external circumstances are so in this case it sounds like you came to metaphor the practice for reframing the meaning of what poverty was and it was the opposite, it was the relationship you found what their wealth was and you found another form of wealth. And so…

CM: Right. And people can get stuck in the pettiness of everyday life. When they’re rich or when they’re poor. It doesn’t matter. People do get stuck in that.

MP: Yeah and so, definitely. The essential part of the elevation strategy is to help people towards growth, connection and contribution because when people are focusing on those things then you just look at problems as a setback or you can look at it as



something that stimulated to you to grow. And you know in this case, it probably wasn’t actually, the truth is that this family’s poverty had stimulated them to be more close-knit, to care about each other more, to be more loving, more considerate.

CM: Right. And what I felt was so needed there was to elevate them out of the shame and the injustice because when you’re focused on emotions of shame and on being a victim of injustice, it’s difficult to get out of that, to move out of that and I felt that the mother had interjected all these shame and was making her sick so moving them away from that to realize that there was nothing to be ashamed about and that they were really a higher level of people was what was needed there.

MP: Yes. One of the hardest things where people get the most talk is when they feel that there is an injustice they tend to focus so much on the things that are outside of their control, the people who did these things to them, the people who…

CM: And on the resentment end.

MP: And on the resentment end. And also, you always had the question of either blame or shame. You know when there has been an injustice which one are you going to do? So, it’s really great to use the elevation strategy to focus on the people’s strength, and the resiliency, and the values and the love that they have and the things that can’t be taken away. Let’s talk about another group where you used the elevation strategy.

CM: Okay. So, this was a very different kind of family. This was a very well-to-do and educated family but what they have in common was the need for elevation for both of them. Where did this start was when I got a call from the eighty-year-old father in the family. He was a very youthful eighty-year old but nevertheless, he was 80 years old and he told me that he had been referred by his daughter who is a psychologist and that the family had a very serious problem with an adult son and the psychologist daughter had insisted that they had to consult with me and only with me. So, he said that he wanted to come and meet me first by himself. I realized that he needed to check me out to see how I was.

And so even though their problem was with an adult son who was a cocaine addict, the father wanted to speak with me first and I said that’s perfectly fine. So he came and we met and he told me that he had several children I think it was three adult children and the son had been severely addicted to cocaine basically since he was an adolescent and he was now married and had two teenage children who were very angry and humiliated by this situation.

The son had had numerous infidelities that were known to everybody and he had done terrible things like for example, one time he had been arrested walking naked in the street and he had no explanation as to why he was naked so he was presenting very disturbed behaviors and he had been detoxed and in rehab several times to no avail. And as we talked, he was at the Betty Ford Clinic but the father had visited him there and was not confident that he would come out and not go back to the drugs and the sister, the



psychologist was also not convinced and so that family interview was important.

At this point, the son’s wife wanted a divorce and said he couldn’t come back home. She was finished with him. So I promised I would do my best and I said I wanted the whole family to come in now because there were adult children and grandchildren and so on. This was a very big family so I said I wanted to reduce the group to just the older parents who were divorced and remarried but I didn’t want the new spouses to come. The adult children, the only spouse I wanted to come was the wife of the cocaine addict and the only grandchildren I wanted there was their children. Nevertheless, even reducing it like this, we had eight people in the room and I plan to have them around the conference table because I wanted this to be as business-like as possible because I knew that the teenage children were very angry and I didn’t want too much emotion, negative emotion. Nevertheless, as soon as we began to talk, the father said something that annoyed the grandchildren and they began to call him names, “You’re a jerk, you’re an idiot,” and they left the room angrily I had to send the grandfather in to convince them to come back down and sit down.

So, I was thinking, you know. I had to get this family to a higher level of being and away from this negativity and anger. The psychologist daughter was sitting there extremely quiet and obviously very anxious about the situation and the wife kept talking about how she would not take her husband back. So, I decided I was going to do something completely different so I said to the family basically addressing the older parents that were both 80 years old. I said, I want to talk about love because really what is important in a family is love. It’s love that…

MP: This is a divorced couple, right?

CM: The divorced couple. Yeah. And remarried to other people. It’s always love that is at the basis and deviation of a family and it’s love that holds the family together over the years. And it’s love what is lacking in the younger couple but I can still see that expression in the two of you, in the older couple even though I know that you’ve been divorced for many years and that you’re married to other people now, I can still see that there is that love between you that has never ceased to exist and that you will always have for each other and for children that you created out of this deep love that you have for each other. So I want the two of you to talk about your love. And the two old people started to talk to each other about the love that they had for each other and it was so moving because even though they had been divorced and remarried for I don’t know how many years, they talked about how they could still feel that love and they began to remember all the wonderful events in their life together – an anniversary party, a trip, a birthday, the birth of a child and the birth of grandchildren and it was interesting because the adult children and the grandchildren were just fascinated. The adult children could not remember a loving situation between their parents. Their memories have been totally distorted by the divorce. The older couple couldn’t believe that their adult children could not remember how they had loved each other.

So, as they kept talking, it was obvious that the love existed, that it never died. And I



actually got this idea at the conference by Gregory Bateson who was a famous anthropologist who was married to Margaret Mead, another famous anthropologist and they divorced. And on this occasion when Gregory Bateson was giving this conference, Margaret Mead was sitting in the front row and he began to talk about how there’s no divorce. Once you have that love it never dies. It can always be rekindled. It’s always there. And I thought what a great concept. I’m going to use this in intervention so that was my inspiration for this.

So, as the older people were talking, everybody calm down and the younger wife said all right, she would take her husband back. He would have to sleep in the guest room until he could prove his good behavior and then she would reconsider. The children then behaved well and had affectionate gestures toward their father and I talked also about the importance of the son who was the addict to finding the way that he could contribute, that was not just his work because what happened was he was a successful salesman but being a salesman didn’t fulfill him. He was very intelligent. He needed something else. So, I talked with him about how he could find a cause that he could dedicate himself to outside of the works so he would have something more elevated to do and I followed this for two years and he was off of drugs and living with the family.

MP: Wow. So, these are two situations where you’re dealing with things that seem very difficult to change. One is the son, and adult man with a cocaine habit, erratic behavior and it sounds like he was even surrounded by family that had some idea of why things changed. They had a psychologist in the family. And then you have this family that’s struck by this horrible economic issues and health issues that – really the elevation strategy allowed you to rewrite the stories of these families so they had another plot, they another way that they could relate themselves.

CM: Yeah. I forgot to say. The only thing that I mentioned about the cocaine addiction is that of course the wife would want him tested regularly and to be able to see that he was clean but we never discussed his motivation or why he was doing drugs or anything like that. We talked about love the whole time and then a little bit about contribution.

MP: So in his case – yeah, that’s interesting – so it was you took him from the need to be loved which is the addiction to the second stage to the third one which is to give love and then to contribute to others.

CM: Right and it was like we resolved the original issue that probably lead him into the addiction because he became an addict when he was a teenager and the parents were divorcing and probably the addiction started as an attempt to cause so much trouble that the father would come back home and so here we were round circle and back to how the parents were divorced but still loved each other and so his addictive behavior was obsolete.

MP: Yeah. We’ll talk about this in other modules but how so many issues and decisions like that come in certain phases of life and relationships. So many addictions for instance come out during teenage years in relation to the parent’s marriage and things like that.

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So, and what’s amazing about this story of how you brought up a love between this old, elderly, divorced couple is that it’s so healing to the family. And you were very intelligent to not to include too many people, you just kept that core unit that was really directly affected by the divorce.

CM: Exactly.

MP: Okay. And now, this is something that you could suggest to any divorced couple. Would you? I mean as proactive measure to help heal the families, heal any feelings or hurts from the past or question the children have about whether the parents – you know children always wonder whether they were conceived in love, whether the parents loved each other when they were born.

CM: And often, the divorce so that the children experience the divorce in such a way that they feel that there was no love ever. And most often, that’s not true. There was love.

MP: Or they have the – another source of confusion is that you could have been in love enough to marry someone then suddenly the love to be gone. Right?

CM: Yes. Also another important thing to point about this case is that when the older couple so movingly talked about their love, the young wife had to stop saying, “I’m not taking him back.” She stepped up and said, “Okay. I’m willing to give him another chance. And it was because of inspiration of the older couple.

MP: So you would recommend that if there’s a couple who were divorced and basically as corrective measure for the children is to get together and do talk about the love and how the love survives.

CM: Exactly, and it just becomes another form of love.

MP: Yeah, it’s very important to fix the culture…

CM: And it was so moving because I realized that the older couple had some regrets. As they talked about this and looked at each other’s eyes, I thought they were thinking, “I can’t believe that we divorced over the stupid reasons we divorced,” even though it was so long ago.

MP: Well, maybe one of the reasons that people are afraid to go through this process is they have to revisit the love that was there and for the sake of the family, it’s very important to get this to the core of the family. And it’s very powerful also to bring, get people to focus on something that’s an implicit underlying emotion that people tend to ignore.

CM: Right. So, I want to relate this in other universal strategy that I use at the beginning when I’m interviewing a family especially if I can tell that there’s a lot of anger, that they’re going through some marital problems or this anger at the teenage children or



maybe they are going through a divorce or they are divorced. So my (inaudible 40.00.3) creating a calm atmosphere so the moment that we sit down, I say before we start, I would like all of us to close our eyes for four minutes and meditate on the love that created this family and the love that has held this family together over the years. You can do it with a couple, “On the love that the two of you had and that brought you together and held you together over the years.” We just like to do a silent meditation maybe two minutes so please close your eyes and we’ll be silent meditating on the love in your relationship and you just sit quietly there with your eyes closed for a couple of minutes and then what happens is that after the meditation they cannot go to the lowest level of their resentments and their anger and the pettiness of their issues. You’ve raised them to a higher level to the level of love.

MP: That’s so interesting because it’s a strategy used in religions but it’s also in having people meditate to get them beforehand but also sports teams do that. It’s a team work kind of orientation. And you know, before a game, they’ll have a moment of silence together with the unified group kind of in a spiritual energetic or emotional level. And it can be really applied to other situations where people have a common purpose and they need to focus and they need to harmonize with each other. So, that’s great. So these are – you know, there are some other ways that you can – I mean do you another story from your life?

CM: Yes. I wanted to tell a story of my life and in relation to Milton Erickson. Milton Erickson is probably the formal interventionist of the 20th century. He was a hypnotist and a psychiatrist. He has basically three important movements, schools of therapy that derived from his works – prestrategic therapy, strategic family therapy and NLP plus he influenced many other schools like Gestalt, the work of Viginia Satir and so on.

And so what happened was that I was very young and this was a long time ago but I was living in Washington D.C. and I was working at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic when my father in Argentina died tragically in a car accident and I just could not overcome the grief over his death. He was very young. And people began to say to me, “You know, you’re in a really bad shape. You should go see Dr. Erickson. Call Dr. Erickson.” So, I called Dr. Erickson who lived in Phoenix and I explained my situation and said that people were insisting that I should ask to see him and he said, “Yes, you must come and I want you to come for an entire week.” And I said, “I have two little children. How can I come for an entire week?” He said, “Bring them.”

So, I came to Phoenix with my two daughters and the nanny so that I could leave them in the hotel and go meet with Dr. Erickson and his office was in his home – a little office. And it was interesting because Tony and I visited his office recently because Tony wanted to see the house and meet Erickson’s widow. So I went in with Tony into the room that was Dr. Erickson’s office and it was interesting because in my memory, I thought it was a big room. And it was a tiny room and the (inaudible 46.06.3) was so modest and small and I had not remembered it in that way at all.

So Erickson antagonized me right at the beginning of a conversation. As I was trying to



explain to him what my father was like, he says to me, “You didn’t have a father. He wasn’t a real father. He didn’t behave like a father.” And I said, “Who is this man to speak like this about my father? What does he know? This is like a cowboy in Arizona. He could never understand my family or where I come from. He doesn’t know anything. I raged that immediately I came out of my grief into anger.

You know it goes to show that anything that can be used negatively like the (inaudible 46.59.3) can be also used positively because you can take a person out of depression and sadness into anger and then move them from anger to something bad instead of back to sadness. So, I was angry but I said it’s true my father was a very busy man. There were times when he was not present, but a lot of the time he was very present and he was very important to me. So then we went on talking about other things and as we were talking about – as you can imagine I don’t remember everything the moment – everyday I had forgotten and most of what we talked about and that’s you know the magic of the hypnotic thing that we were talking about work.

And he said to me another thing that made me furious. He said, “Oh, you won’t have any trouble getting along with people because you’re a follower. You’re not a leader so you’ll just follow, just follow somebody.” I said, “What is this? This man doesn’t get it at all who I am.” And actually this kind of confrontational work has inspired a lot of schools of therapy. For example Albert Ellis basically did that in Rational Emotive Therapy if a person would come and say to Albert Ellis, “I’m worthless.” Ellis would say, “You’re more than worthless. You’re a worm. You’re totally worthless,” until he provoked the person into coming out of that behavior.

So I could tell that Erickson was provoking me deliberately but, yeah, I still got into it and then he would – he saw me for many hours and he had to see other patients in between. So he would talk to me for an hour or so and then tell me to sit in the living room of his house while he saw another patient and he would ask me to read the biography of Margaret Mead while I sat there. And I kept thinking why do I have to read this and I said to him, “Why do I have to read this?” And he said, “Someday, you will figure it out.” And later I realized that Margaret Mead was a metaphor of a successful career woman who had made a huge contribution to her field and actually there were many parallels between the life of Margaret Mead and my life and I think that Erickson was inspiring me to get out of my grief and get out of my family issues and focus on my mission.

And it was interesting because from time to time, he would interrupt what he was talking to me and he would say, “You know I want to understand that I’m not talking to you as a patient. I’m talking to you as a colleague.” And here I was very young and he was elevating me to the level of his colleague so you know I’m not sure what he did but I left there and my career just boomed! And it was interesting because these four meeting with Erickson I was excruciatingly shy, I couldn’t speak. I guess there were more than two people, just three people in the room I suppose. I had palpitations, my voice would shake, my hands were freezing cold, I couldn’t make a presentation and it was a real handicap because being a psychologist, I had to present cases and do public-speaking and



well, since I saw Erickson I just would think it’s not about me, it’s about how I can help others and what I have to teach and what I have to say it’s not about me I would come out of that completely and never had that shyness again.

MP: Wow.

CM: So, he saw my children for a little while, told me that they were fine, they played with his dogs and that was it.

MP: Wow. So this is another shed why basically something he provoked you into a position where you had to take a leadership role and then gave you a model that you could follow.

CM: Right. That’s right.

MP: And he basically brought you to another higher level of aspiration.

CM: That’ right. That’s right.

MP: That’s very cool.

CM: Yeah. We still have time for…

MP: He kind of set you up. So you know that’s amazing. So you know I think what we should do now – it’s 1:52. So, I think what I’d like to do at this point is we want to take some questions we had some lined up. Let’s go, let’s take a couple of minutes and go through some summaries, some kind of real concrete take-aways that people can follow to use the elevation strategy in different situations. Does that make sense?

CM: Okay.

There are five main ways here and there are probably more than these but these are five good place to start if you’re trying to use the ways that you can apply the elevation strategy. And quickly, I just want to mention, the other day I sent out an email to everyone about a story that we got from someone who was not yet in the program who had used some of the materials and teachings from enrollment week when we were giving teachings to the community and she worked in a psychiatric institute as a nurse. And she used the elevation strategy in a fantastic way with the lady who was going to check herself in to the hospital and was basically on the floor with grief. And this lady, she used the elevation strategy with her as nurse did and got the woman back on her feet and she was happy when she was wow, that she was amazing. I mean that was a very powerful thing she used.

CM: She prevented, she prevented the hospitalization.

MP: She prevented. Yes. I mean sometimes the elevation strategy makes a huge



difference for someone at a decision point, a key decision point in their life. And when they’re in the right state, when they are thinking about the right priorities they can be making decisions that are a thousand times better than what they will be making in a bad state.

So quickly, the first of the five ways that you can use the elevation strategy is to ask the person about the higher purpose or the greater aspiration and the keyword here is higher purpose. For instance, in the Dana and Greg intervention, Tony asked Greg what was the next thing for him. Tony saw that Greg was a little defensive that he was – had a little bit of chip on the shoulder and was humiliated by his problem. So Tony asked Greg for his own belief system to understand what is the most important and the job here is to elicit Greg’s system not to supply your own.

So this is a quick side note. When you talk to anyone in an intervention and you realized that you’re talking about something that was very important to them, whether it’s something they do, something they like or something they want, then you need to pay attention to the specific wording they use. So you don’t want to paraphrase someone else’s thoughts or something that’s important you use the exact same words and because those phrases are powerful within that person’s neurophysiology and those phrases are actually powerful within a person’s relationships and their whole culture.

So, anyway, in two more ways to elicit the person’s higher power, the higher aspiration, what Milton Erickson did with you Cloe is an example of that. He presented you with a role model and someone you can think about and study and emulate. And then if you want to bring someone to their own greater higher aspiration, just ask them a simple question. So what’s life’s about? When you ask people simple big questions about life, about the big picture things they want, the responses are usually positive. They’re usually something like, “I want love, I want joy, I want to be happy.” And once you understand what that thing is for that person, you can help him get there.

A second way to use the elevation strategy is to focus on growth and contribution. So, most people know deep down that they could be contributing beyond themselves and that would make them happier and so people tend to respond to the idea of growth and contribution. Tony usually says that these are the laws of the universe so everything in the universe is either growing or dying and from an ecological standpoint everything must contribute beyond itself or it will be eliminated. So that’s growth and then contribution.

Life empowers those who empower life. So often you can tell a story or give an example you can talk about some of your efforts, things that you’re struggling with in a way that focuses on growth and contribution. Another way to do this with people is to talk about the Six Human Needs which you saw on the Tony film. And according to the Six Human Needs, the four needs of the personality which are certainty, variety, significance, and connection. And then there are the two top needs of the spirit which are growth and contribution and when you go to the Six Human Needs with someone which we’ll go into in greater depth in further modules. People tend to evaluate the way that they’re meeting



their own needs and their focus tends to become elevated to think about the last top two needs which is growth and contribution which is a higher level of content.

The third way to use the elevation strategy is to focus on gratitude. Cloe’s example of families and what they have to be grateful for and how they can focus on their love between the individuals underlying emotions of love. These are very powerful strategies. They’re also powerful because they’re focusing on the underlying emotions that we neglect but we know that are there and so they become very evident once you acknowledge them. So the fact that we have a lot to be grateful for and that families, even troubled families have intercurrence of love and affection that’s still there.

Gratitude is one of those emotions that’s incompatible with the negative emotions so if someone is associated with gratitude and true appreciation, they get out of the scarcity mentality, they get out of that lower dimensions of spiritual development where they’re focusing on, controlling the environment and getting love. They focus on giving love.

And again, you can guide, focus on this by simply giving an example or telling a story or complimenting the person or the group or talking about something that makes you feel grateful.

The fourth way to use the elevation strategy is to focus on someone specific to serve. So the fourth, you know, if you can guide the focus on someone to serve in a specific way, it’s a great way to get people to focus on action, tasks and solutions. So you can give an assignment. I don’t know how many of you saw our film about what Tony did on September 11, 2001 but he was basically in session with a group on the same of the terrorist attacks in New York. And one of the most innovative and powerful things that he did – people were freaking out, people were fighting, people had political differences and so forth, he brought everyone to focus by saying, “Hey, some people in this room have actually lost people or businesses today. Completely lost people that they’ve lived with have died.” And he said, “These people are going to be our priority today. Everyone else has the right to be upset but you know that you have to get over it and you need to serve the people who are dealing with the real damage.” And by dividing them into groups and focusing on the people who were directly impacted and giving everyone something specific that they could do to serve, it shifted the entire room.

And as we said, if we have divorcing couples or couples that are fighting, you can often bring them to focus on the good of the children and with specific things that they can do to make their children happier and that’s the way to focus on specific things that they can do to serve.

And of course one of the simplest ways to use the elevation strategy is to compliment someone, to raise someone’s state and this is only you can do at anytime and sometimes are a little cagey about receiving compliments so one of the simplest ways to do it is to just to compliment the positive intent of someone so if you don’t really know, you may not know someone very well, you may not know what they really value, what’s something that’s very important or you may not know very much what’s really important



to them about themselves. You can serve with a neutral compliment that pretends with intention. You could say something like, “You know, one thing that I really appreciate you is you seem very trustworthy,” or “I’ve got the feeling that you’re a very heartfelt person,” or “You’re very dependable.” Once he accepts that at the level of intention and most people will not dispute this kind of compliment because it’s so neutral, then if they acknowledge that you can often compliment them at something that’s more specific then you might learn a little bit more about what’s important to them. And just giving – acknowledging people for the things that they find important is a form of elevating them which it puts them in a position where they are able to enjoy and appreciate and acknowledge the things that they care for. And they’re usually the things that are higher level person as well. So these are five kind of concrete ways that you can use the elevation strategy in most situations. So, I think Cloe that we have some questions?

CM: Okay.

MP: We’ve got a whole bunch from the webcast and we got one live here so we’ll just take this first.

CM: Okay.

MP: David from New York. Hey, there.

David: Yes. Yeah.

CM: Hi, David.

David: Hi, Cloe. Hi, Mark. Yeah. I was curious about your four levels of spiritual growth theory that is the four spiritual dimensions and do you find that they tend to be universal for that person or that they apply separately? For instance with Greg that his one need when it came to his sexual issue was the need to control, the need to protect himself but that may not have been defining for him across the board on his wife but just in that one instance.

CM: In my experience, it usually is across in the whole life of a person.

David: Okay.

CM: So Dana and Greg actually had worked together and they had issues that worked also and it was the same thing. It had to do with Greg’s need to control and protect himself.

David: Okay. Good.

CM: And it was tied to his history because I think that he had never met the father – his father. And so he probably had grown up instead of feeling protected feeling that he had to protect himself. I think, wasn’t it like that, Mark?



MP: Yeah. I mean he has – there was some family history things...

CM: Yeah. So you can tell because one of the ways that you can tell at what stage the person needs is you look at different areas on their life and that was predominant although the interesting thing in out work is you can never say never and you can never say always. There are cases where it’s just focused on one thing. For example, just the sex and in all other areas, the person is at another level of spiritual development.

David: Okay. And that was what I was wondering if you know in one environment they might have the need to control and in another environment they might be at the need to give love. Okay. Thanks, Cloe.

CM: Yeah. Exactly. For example, there are many doctors who can be very controlling in their family life and when they are in the hospital, they are in the giving mood and then not controlling so they easily delegate to the nurse, they collaborate with other doctors. They don’t have that problem. It’s focused only on the family life. I’ve seen that a lot, too.

David: Okay. Great. And that’s kind of what I was looking for, was you know, trying to find out if would (inaudible 1.03.12.3) or with a particular issue if we need to define their spiritual dimension that related to specifically two bad issue or if we make generalizations to say that this is how they are across the board and what they’re dealing within in each facet of their lifes.

CM: No, for example, if you have a doctor who is very controlling of his wife and of the children and of the household and have to have his way all the time and so on, but you ask him about his life at work and you find out that he delegates some of the nurses and that he gets along with people, that he’s caring and not controlling then you use that as an example of how if he can be like that at the hospital, he can be like that at home also.

David: Okay. Great. So sort of infusing or tying that over into other aspects of his life?

CM: Exactly.

David: Okay. Thank you very much, Cloe.

CM: Thank you for the question.

MP: And sometimes there are type of focus that bleed over from one area of your life to another for instance so you can be very loving at home but also at work you have to focus so much on details that you can bring kind of workaholism into the house. Obviously, that’s another way that it works.

CM: Yeah.

MP: So, Cloe, I have a question here. And I think this should be interesting to ask in



terms of the four levels. There’s a question of how can you elevate yourself out of a situation? So if your focus is often so stuck, that is very hard to do. That’s the question and I’m thinking Cloe that the four dimensions of spiritual development are also something that you can use for yourself if you feel like you’re stuck in one area.

CM: Absolutely. So that if you’re stuck in controlling, you can think what I really want is to be loved, what love am I looking for? Or where are the people who love me? It’s interesting because sometimes people so ignore who really loves them and are so totally confused about that so focus on who in your life has given you the most love and think about that relationship. If you are focused on hungry and needing more and more love all the time, focus on who needs your love and how you can give to others and how you can contribute. And if you are totally focused on contributing outside of your circle, then think about who you have to forgive and what do you have to repent about inside your circle, in your primary relationship. By primary relationship, I mean is supposed the secondary relationships. But primary relationships are the ones basically with family, they’re people with whom you have a past, the present and will have your future together.

MP: Uh-hmm.

CM: Do you think that answers, Mark?

MP: Yeah, that’s a great one so you can be very calculated in that way. And I would say the other thing is that you have to be – remember that this has to do with your state so you want to find things that you can do that are not just contemplative but sometimes give yourself an activity or give yourself an assignment that will break that state so if your friends are very focused on controlling your environment, then work something, a gesture that you can do that would bring, that would take you into the area of love or like something love you know. And it’s funny because so many people who have performance issues like at work and they’re focused so much on controlling their environment. They’ll actually sabotage themselves because then they’ll want to be – if it was a mess up and see if whether they’ll be forgiven by the people and so a lot of people do really well and then they’re always late so the people can always forgive them and you know that’s how they get a little bit of love. You know so, it’s interesting how it works. So we have another great question here. Nina, are you there?

Nina: Yes.

MP: Great. Hey.

CM: Hi.

Nina: I was wondering about the four dimensions that you said when you get through repentance and forgiveness then you spiral back down. It seems to me that…

CM: You spiral up not back down. If I said back down that was a mistake. You spiral but it is an ever, ever moving upward spiral.



Nina: Yeah, that’s why I was thinking that when you go back to domination and control it’s at a higher level than it was before.

CM: Exactly. But still you have to control your environment that is to a certain point. You know most of us cannot be a monk in the cave.

Nina: Yes, right. Okay.

CM: Okay. Thank you for the clarification. Thank you very much.

MP: Yeah, definitely it’s like, you basically – from the spiral metaphor, I think even if you start over, if you were for instance at the point of love and repentance and then you go to the next level and it’s basically a repetition of the first level, right? But it’s at the higher.

CM: That’s right. You’re there at the higher level now.

MP: That’s not that you’re going right back down to the bottom level again.

CM: Exactly. You come to it from a higher level of understanding and spirituality.

MP: That’s right. So, for instance, your new concern was controlling the environment that’s infused with already having forgiven, having repentance and now maybe controlling your environment with another level of…

CM: At a higher level. For example, introducing more beauty into your environment.

MP: Uh-hmm. Or doing it for the sake of others.

CM: That’s right.

MP: Great. We have another question. And I think what we’ll do as I can’t see her phone number then just say your name and we’ll see who. Yep. You have a question?

Alexandra: Yup. I’m Alexandra.

CM: Hi, Alexandra.

MP: Okay.

Alexandra: Yes. Hello. I want to ask to Cloe. You said before that it’s very important that both partners are in the same dimension? In the same level of dimension?

CM: Yes.

Alexandra: You also said that sometimes it’s different so there’s one partner in one



dimension and the other in the other and I wonder how it’s possible to make that – to level that again so you know what I see is that mostly if it’s out of phase and they keep going to other levels but not, that it’s difficult to synchronize.

CM: Yes. For example I’ve just worked recently with several young couples where the husband is very focused at the level of domination and control because he’s trying to improve the economic situation of the family and the wife is very focused on meeting love because she’s raising little children and she needs the husband to feed her emotionally so that she can give.

So what I’ve done is that I’ve explained this to them and I’ve said that a mistake is that so often, the wife thinks of the husband’s work situation as his work and he thinks of his work having nothing to do with the wife and I want them to talk about our work because it’s really the work of the two of them as a team. So her collaboration to his situation at work is that she is going to be interested in it, she will visit him there, she will listen to him, she will give him emotional support and that will help him to think of the family life as ‘our family, our love, our needs’ in the family and to give her more emotionally. So that when I do, it’s basically team building so they’re not – they don’t have these separate, clearly, defined separate roles, which is fine to have that, you know, the clear, separate roles is the traditional marriage, which has worked for thousands of years where the husband is outside of the home taking care of matters in the world and the wife is taking care of the home and the family. But in our society, there cannot be that extreme division anymore because the couple gets too far apart and so I do that as a team building. So, I bring her more into his spiritual level and I bring him more into her spiritual level.

RM: You can elevate them together by the common purpose so that’s being done for the family.

CM: That’s right. So instead of her criticizing him, “He only cares about his work, he doesn’t help me, he does this long hours, I never see him, he never sees the children,” and all that, she can say, “I so appreciate his sacrifice that he doesn’t spend the time that he would like to have with me and the children because we are doing this to create a successful economy for us,” for example. For him, instead of feeling she’s just full of demands and doesn’t appreciate my sacrifice she won’t feel that anymore because she will express that she does appreciate.

Alexandra: Uh-hmm. And if they are divorced already? How can you get them together or they can face – so they can please, be more peaceful together?

CM: Yes, I take them to the fact that they are going to always be parents together and they are going to have to be grandparents together and they have to plan how they’re going to be at their children’s weddings together. And how they are going to handle the inevitable family crisis that happens from time to time in the life of a family. And the – I just project them into that future and how they can, they have the opportunity now to build the strength, to continue to be a team and be able to do these things for the sake of the grandchildren.



Alexandra: Okay.

CM: Often people will do for the grandchildren what they won’t do for their children.

Alexandra: Okay. Thank you.

CM: All right.

MP: Yeah. Our culture doesn’t have an adequate language yet for parents who are post-divorced.

CM: Yeah.

RM: You know we have certain archetypical categories that in terms of view of mother, father, grandfather, grandmother that the phenomenon of the divorced we don’t established roles but a lot of things that you need to do with people who are divorced is help them feel like a family post-divorce.

CM: Yeah.

MP: So they can still function in raising the children.

CM: Yes. And you know it’s up to us the coaches, the strategic interventionists, the therapists to create some norms, some rules for how people could behave after divorce so that everybody can get along. If we don’t create those norms, nobody else will.

MP: Yep.

Alexandra: It gets so very complicated, isn’t it?

CM: I know. I know. All right. Thank you. It was a great question.

MP: So, here’s another question, Cloe. Oh, great. Thank you. So here’s another question it’s what you do with the couple when they elevated in session but they don’t hold on to the language once they leave the session. So what do you do make the provision strategy stick.

CM: Yes. Well, you have to bring them back and remind them of where they were and bring them back into where they were. You know, this is not something that you can resolve in five minutes. You have to persist at it and I’m doing so much work on the phone that I just – I will say you know, email me or set up another brief phone call if you feel that you’re forgetting where you were. It requires repetition. You either have to have the huge intensity of Tony’s interventions in front of thousands of people or you have to have the repetition that keeps the intensity.

MP: Or sometimes there are ways that you or Tony will anchor in the privacy you’ve



made in the elevation. So you’ll anchor it in by, you’ll basically a set marker so you’ll either have an agreement, that might be on paper or you have certain commitments that people make in those situations like for instance that you know, we’re not going to fight in front of the children. Or we’re going to do these things, these are very important to us and …

CM: Or you can have a horrible consequence, for example, every time that you begin to think that you’re worthless, you’re going to write a check for five hundred dollars to this charity.

MP: Exactly. So there’s a different…

CM: And so you meet a higher level of spirituality or there’s a consequence of a donation that they have to make.

MP: Uh-hmm. So I have a question here. Thank you for all this teaching, I love it. I wonder about using provocation as there are sometimes we should be aware of using provocation and that the person is so low and kind of suicidal.

CM: Oh. Thank you for the question. No, you should not use provocation unless you are very experienced.

MP: Yes.

CM: Even to this day, I don’t use provocation because I’m afraid that I’ll use it wrongly. And so, at the point that Erickson was using provocation, he was already a very old man and very experienced and he could tell who he could use it with. Albert Ellis seemed to be old since I was born. I don’t know. He seemed to be also old and very experienced. So unless you are like that, very experienced, old and totally confident now, it’s just an interesting example of what can be done that you have to be very careful with that.

MP: Yeah. That’s a good point.

CM: Yeah.

MP: I have a question. Can you please define love in context of this course as opposed to connection?

CM: Oh! Well, Mark you’re going to have to help him. Well connection is…

MP: I think love, I think the way that we’ve just said to be very practical about it, we will define love as being more passionate and if it’s romantic love and very heartfelt, so you can have connection with people and it can be you know, no great shakes, just you have a good connection. You’re almost like being friends or neighbors and love is a little deeper. It really depends on when you need this but it’s important to have where love is becoming – is very useful in an interventionist is when you connect to someone,



something that’s so personal or he really cares deeply about it. So in the case here I’m thinking that you maybe talking about that intervention where the couple were talking about their love. Right? The old divorced couple or the family who was talking about their love.

CM: Yeah.

MP: And there’s these interventions where it’s very important for people to acknowledge the bonds that they have together and so in these case we had adult children who had suffered through a divorce who one of whom that looked like he may have taken them off track in terms of his life in certain ways to reconcile that, by bringing love as the basis of the family back. And so…

CM: Let’s me say something here.

MP: Yes.

CM: When the characteristics of love are dead, either you have passion or you have intensity in the sense of history together, or you have protection that is a component of love. So the passion would include the love between a couple. The history will include the love between brothers and sisters, adult-children and parents. The protection would include the love between parents and younger children whereas, in connection you may, will have less of a history or you could also have a history. You would not have the passion and you would not have that level of protectiveness but you know there is a fine line sometimes.

MP: That’s a great way of thinking about it because those are useful in different relationships.

CM: Right.

MP: That’s great. If anyone who has any – if anyone else who has question on the phone you can go ahead and press star-two and that’ll be raising your hand. I’ve got a good question here from the web cast. The question is: I just had a situation at work over this past week where a senior person was surpassed by a junior to get the team manager role simply because the junior is proactively working towards it, where the senior is waiting passive for it to be handed to him. He is now stuck in behavior that is not contributing at all and can’t get over it. What would work in this situation and how?

That’s very interesting. That’s a perceived injustice. It sounds like there are two people who are in line for the role. The senior person thought that they were just next in line; the younger person hustled for it and got the job. And so what does the senior person do now? They feel like their future has probably been…

CM: Well, they have to look for another opportunity and be more pro-active or they have to find a way of creating another opportunity. You know, those things don’t just happen.



You can create the needs. So he, the senior person has to think about how it was in that context. He or she can create the need for a better opportunity and then grab it. But to commiserate with one’s self and feel bad about not having been pro-active is not going to help.

MP: Uh-hmm. Great. We have a question here. The question… Just say, “Hello,” and we’ll hear you. I can’t hear you.

Sylvie: Uhm… Is that – Is that me? I’m calling from Sweden. This is Sylvie here. That’s why you don’t recognize the number.

CM: Okay. Hello.

MP: Hi, there.

Sylvie: Hi. Please let me know if this is not relevant to the lesson but I have a little question regarding the text you posted with Module II: Defining Meaning and Purpose. Right before the four levels of emotional and spiritual development, there are twelve points of organizing principles and I had wondered than which was the end of point seven that said the quality of life comes down to the quality of the emotions we experienced as well as the vehicles we choose like you talk about the meanings we attached to the vehicles we choose and I wonder if you could just elaborate a little bit on it because I just don’t make the connection. There.

CM: Oh. Okay. Well, what it means, the quality of life depends on the emotions you choose and the vehicles you choose to experience those emotions, right? So if you’re a person that most of the time is experiencing anger or fear, or resentment or envy, obviously you have a lower quality of life than the person who most of the time is experiencing love and joy and beauty or peace, right? And the vehicles matter also because if you’re a person that experiences love for example, or joy a lot of the time that is in order for you to feel love you have to feel that you have the unconditional love of all of your friends, all of your family and all of your co-workers, you make it very difficult to experience love because what are the chances that everybody is going to love you unconditionally? If in order to experience joy, you need to feel that everyone that you know is happy and is successful and is not in danger or is not sick, it’s going to be very difficult to experience joy. So when you are striving to experience the positive emotions more frequently, you have to be careful about what are your vehicles? Meaning what has to happen for you to experience those positive emotions and you have to make it easy on yourself. For example, I was in recently in Denmark and since it’s a neighboring country to…

Sylvie: Yeah, you should have come to visit.

CM: Right. So, I was teaching this and I wanted to give an example so I had people write down the emotions that they commonly experience and I ask the person to come up to the front of the room and she said that her favorite emotion that she likes to experience



is joy. So I said, “Okay. What has to happen for you to experience joy?” And she said, “Well, I just come out the door and look at my garden and that fills me with joy.” So I said, “Okay. That’s very easy. You just have to open the door.” So, I said, “So, what else has to happen?” She said, “I like to look at the ocean. So I drive to the ocean and look at the ocean and I experience joy.” And in Demark, anywhere you’re less than half an hour from the ocean. So it’s very easy to get to the ocean. So I said to her, “You know, you’re too normal. You’re not a good example.” So I asked for another person to come up and she said, “Love.” I said, “So, what has to happen for you to experience love?” And she said, “Oh, I pet my dog and I experience love.” How easy is it every day to pet your dog? Very easy, right? So the Danish people are all so normal that I couldn’t find one example of a negative vehicle.

Sylvie: Okay,

CM: I know that the Swedish people are like that also, aren’t they?

Sylvie: Yeah. I’m a Hungarian living here in Sweden. I could give you the vehicles that are not so really easy.

CM: Okay. Right.

Sylvie: But thanks a lot.

CM: You see what I mean. They had easy ways of experiencing the positive emotions. That’s what it means that the quality of your life depends on the positive emotions that you want to experience and the vehicles you use to get them.

Sylvie: Exactly. So you have to choose your vehicles realistically like it shouldn’t be too easy. You should work for them a bit but not make them impossible otherwise, you’re never set.

CM: You’re never going to experience the emotion. In contrast, here in the States in California I was teaching this to a group of therapists and one therapist said that for her to experience joy, every single patient that she sees on any given day has to thank her and tell her how wonderful she is and how she changed their lives. So what are the chances that every single patient will say that? None. So she could never experience joy.

Sylvie: She should have a great secretary who gives out the words before.

CM: That’s right. That’s a good idea.

Sylvie: Well, thanks a lot. It clarified it all. Thank you.

CM: Thank you.

MP: Great. We have a couple of questions that…



CM: Well, it’s an hour but we’ll take them quickly.

MP: We’re almost done and these are just, I think this is a – let’s take this one. It says, “If you are divorced you have a hard time to remember the love that you shared. Is there a certain way that you can go by to get those feelings thinking of a couple sitting in a therapy session and they’re not finding those feelings?” I also got another question that’s somewhat similar saying, “How can you bring people to an elevated state but they don’t have all of the surroundings of a Tony Robbins seminar?” And those are both good questions and to answer I’ll start with, is that’s the elevation strategy. The reason that it’s a megastrategy is because it’s a muscle that you learn to use. So you have to put into practice and become skilled at bringing people to higher level. It’s not – it’s just like a one-two-three that you can just be done. The love – the megastrategies are things that you can do that you become very – it’s like if you’re a basketball player and you practice throwing it in the basket an one hour a day and you become a great basketball player. Even the best basketball players spend one hour a day doing that.

CM: Let me add something to that.

MP: Yes.

CM: So, for example, with the divorced couple, you can say to them, even though you’re now divorced and you don’t love each other in the way that you used to, I think it’s important to remember the good things about the relationship. So I’d like to know when was for each of you the moment when you felt the greatest love for each other? Was it the courtship? Was it the wedding day? Was it the honeymoon? The birth of a child? When was it? So you take them there and you say that if that love existed, it’s never completely lost. Because love is just energy and so it’s still there and so they can use the good parts of that love even though that love has changed then it’s not that anymore. And with the other elevating people when you don’t have the audience that Tony has, it’s the examples that I gave, for example, the meditation before you begin to talk , the meditation and the love that brought them together, talking about what was the best thing they ever did for others or for each other. There’s a thousand ways. You know it would be interesting, Mark to give out a little exercise so that people can send us an email with five different ways that you can elevate someone. Wouldn’t that be good?

MP: Oh, that’s great. That’s a great way. Yeah, that’s a great way so let’s have that. If anyone has you know – think of five ways that you can elevate and then we’ll compile it as a list.

CM: Yes.

MP: Because it’s basically what you’re doing is your guiding someone’s attention to something that’s valuable that they’re neglecting.

CM: Uh-hmm.



MP: You know it’s either their own values with themselves or something they’ve experienced or something that they think is important or something that someone else has done for them. And you – it’s just becoming aware of how, knowing how to help someone locate their attention on that and that area. So friendships, in this case, were you just as you said Cloe. People say, “No. We don’t love each other.” You can say, “Yes, I understand that you don’t love each other the way you did at another time you’re in a different phase now. But, and then you clarify for them what they could feel. Right?

CM: Uh-hmm.

RM: So, I mean that’s just a matter of becoming very skillful guiding so much attention to something that’s valuable, which is the love, even if in a divorced couple, it’s valuable.

CM: And all of always in a divorced couple you have to emphasize that even though they don’t love each anymore it has to end wise. They have to love each other as parents to their common children and so that love has to stay in that sense.

MP: Great.

CM: Okay. All right.

RM: All right, guys. Well, thank you so much. I got an email, a couple of people who were asking some questions that were related to getting an email of some sort. I’m not sure exactly what that meant but just go ahead and send me an email if you that question still. And then so it’s – we’re at the end of our session. Let’s unmute and say goodbye to each other and see each other next time,

CM: Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming guys.

MP: Goodbye everybody. Thank you

CM: Bye.

RM: Hold on, hold on, okay. Thank you. We’ll see each other again.


1 - intro - module 2 - dana & greg - teleclass - transcript

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