I don’t know how to say this, because I’m kind of in shock, but…
Check this out. I recently got an email from my Dad who is 84 years old. He started by sharing a thread of inspirational quotes (with and without attribution), such as:
Your circumstances may be uncongenial, but they shall not remain so if you perceive an ideal and strive to reach it. James Allen
Excellence means commitment to completion.
Success is a not a destination, but a journey. It is not something you get, it is something you are becoming, it never ends, it is infinite in terms of growth.
And then he added this:
I apologize for the length of this post. You’ve seen much of it in the past, but the context may be new. I worked with a man in California, Al Tomsik, early seventies, who had a business promoting good ideas and concepts that would lead to success, in any venture. …
The wealth and understanding he had at his fingertips would blow you away. He first introduced me to the stick–man. Anyway, just put this away for sometime…
Hold on – did I just read that right? I needed some clarification:
Wait a minute – you knew about the stickman in the 1970s?? The stickman I learned from Bob Proctor, or something else?
I wanted to know if he had actually heard about Dr. Thurman Fleet’s Mind Model from someone other than me. He replied flatly:
Affirmative… I didn’t use it in the 70’s, but Tomsik used it when I worked for him. It’s in my files from that era. …
I don’t know the exact date I encountered it. The class material I used for Tomsik and the Stick Man was when we were in California.
(Is this a classic example of a generous father humoring his daughter when she excitedly tells him something that he’s actually known all along?)
Obviously, I had a hard time wrapping my brain around this. How could I spend so much of my life the last twenty years teaching this and NOT already know that my Dad had learned about it when I was a baby?
So I replied:
How come I don’t remember you ever mentioning this? This is kind of huge to find out my dad was learning this when I was a baby!
Actually, it turns out he learned about the stickman concept from Al sometime between May 9 and September 1, 1970, four months before I was born.
I never knew this! I guess I was bound to learn about it one way or another.
Coincidentally, my Dad’s name is also Bob. Not Robert… Bob. It’s literally that on his birth certificate.
As we emailed back and forth, Dad went on to share some of his actual notes from that training in 1970. I still can’t believe that I’ve been teaching this material for 20 years and am only now just finding this out about my father. Maybe he did mention it long ago, but I just didn’t remember. Regardless, what a treasure it is to have this now:
Dr. Thurman Fleet in the 1930’s, in San Antonio, Texas;
“You are going to have to alter some ideas in your mind, but in order to do that, you are going to have to have a picture to work with, and he told me about a doctor in San Antonio, Texas who started the Concept Therapy movement, who was trying to teach the healing arts and he ran into a problem. He said the medical profession, of which he was a member, were treating symptoms for effects, they were not treating causes. But if you are ever going to enjoy whole health, you must treat the whole person. That’s called Holistic healing. He said if we’re going to treat the whole person, we’re going to have to give them a picture of the other side of their personality. And he said, “since no person has ever seen the mind, I’m going to make a picture of the mind.”
He said, “let this represent the mind. And then let this represent, what we’ve given all of our total attention to up to now, the body. You see, the body is what provides the action that produces our results. To change our results, we must change our actions. But our actions are driven by the mind. If we’re going to change what’s going on in the mind, we’re going to have to understand how it functions. And as he pointed out, there are two sections to the mind. Joined together, but different in their method of operation. He called this the conscious mind and this the sub-conscious mind. What we have here is a picture to begin to work with.
He then described the stick-man this way…
Conscious Mind – this is the part of you that thinks, your free will lies here. The conscious mind can accept or reject any idea. No person or circumstance can cause you to think about thoughts or ideas you do not choose. The “thoughts” you choose eventually determine the results in your life. All pain, pleasure and limitation is originated in the conscious mind, or accepted uncritically from an outside source. As you accept a thought, it is impressed upon the second part of your personality.These are some of the most important words you will ever read or that can have a greater impact upon your life, “No person or circumstance…”
[Al Tomsic added] You can do anything you want, but understand this. If you don’t know how this works, you haven’t got a snowball’s chance of doing it.
And then again…
It could be that he didn’t share it with me because, as curious or interesting as it was (enough that he would still have his notes from those trainings), he was struggling at the time with underemployment, and didn’t have the opportunity to learn about it more deeply before he had to move on to another venture.
The reality is, I was born during a very stressful time in my parents’ marriage. One of his notes said he only earned $400 during the three months he learning from Tomsik. In today’s dollars, this would be like earning about $3000 in 3 months, while trying to support a family of 5 (with me on the way).
Although his results didn’t feel swift or profound, he believed in the power of the subconscious mind, and they eventually got through that difficult time. He was able to build an impressive career in quality control, contracting all around the world, creating curriculum, and writing textbooks for University-level training programs.
Although he may not have taught me about the stickman, I did learn from both parents the idea that the mind was a powerful tool. My mother read Psycho-Cybernetics in the 70s and used what she learned about affirmations to help me memorize words for a spelling test.
I also inherited my dad’s love for mind-stretching brain teasers. He taught me to be a problem-solver, and helped to convince me that there was no problem that couldn’t be solved.
Eventually, I think it was his love for electronics that helped later pique my interest in how our remote control could possibly turn the TV knobs from across the room without even a battery (something we talk about now in every Genius Bootcamp).
Investigating that phenomena has helped my students understand how their thoughts can have a very real, measurable, detectible impact on their circumstances.
He also let me play with the equipment at his electronics lab where he taught at the high school. As a toddler I’d push buttons and flip oscilloscope switches in his classroom on the weekends.
I’d sit on a tall stool at the black screens and make the green wavy lines do wild things, and I’d play with the knobs to see how I could change the waves:
Looking back, I now recognize those early experiences as seeds that would help me be curious, and perhaps even more readily understand the Law of Vibration, when I’d learn about it from Bob Proctor twenty-five years later.
(To learn more about the laws and how they impact our results, read the FREE ebook Hidden Treasures.)
History behind the Radio Analogy
You may have heard me talk about the radio analogy, how it can explain the results we get in life, and whether or not we will tap into those genius ideas that help us get what we want and need. Did you know that I don’t just talk about the radio analogy because it’s a cool way of understanding success?
I think my fascination with the explanation may come from the fact that when I was a child, my dad set up a real radio station in 1974 which still exists today. It’s called KOHS, operated exclusively by electronics students at the high school where he was a teacher. He literally put up that radio tower by hand, and trained his students to understand how it works, and how to run it:
Link to the original article, Orem Geneva Times, October 31, 1974 (I was 3 years old!)
Here’s Dad with some of his students when he was the Electronics teacher at Orem High School:
Anyway, it’s fun to learn new things. It’s even “funner” to look back and see how different experiences in your life (sometimes decades earlier) worked together to bring you to a certain place in the here and now.
It’s amazing to me that my own father learned about the stick-man while I was in my mother’s womb.
Can you think of any moments in your life that later proved to be more significant to your journey than you originally realized?
What experiences have brought you to this place now? It’s something to ponder.
_______________
To learn more about the stickman concept (aka Mind Model) and how it has changed the lives of probably millions since the 1930s, watch this video:
- Rare Faith What we do to ourselves - April 19, 2024
- Rare Faith Waiting for the other shoe to drop - April 15, 2024
- Waiting for the other shoe to drop - April 12, 2024
One Response
That is so crazy! It seems you already had a stick man vibration in the womb!! I love it!
When I look back to my childhood, I have memories of concern for friends who didn’t have the same support that I did in my family. I spent a lot of time encouraging them and helping them with mindset. It’s uncanny to see it come full circle–being that I am still encouraging, supporting, and coaching mindset!