198 | How to Read People: Why Disney & Police Hire This Expert

that kept coming back all the time from all these people was frustration and confusion. And I went, well, tell me about your personal life. What about this confusion, this frustration? They said, well, yeah, we were told, especially Gen X and baby boomers, we were taught to go out from the family, go and work our tails off to bring the resources back. So we showed our love by being absent teaches us how to communicate with the other person. There is the old golden rule, which is treat others as you would have them treat you. This is a respect side of things. But the platinum rule is treat others as they would have you treat them. And I thought now, I realized later on that for the first 25 years of our life, from 0 to 25, we had the face our parents gave us. From 25 to 50, we have the face that we gave ourselves.

Thanks very much, Doug. Appreciate it.

Probably a good place to start would be stop and listen. Do a lot of talking. We're quick to try and fix problems when a problem comes up because we are emotional beings. But I find that most men, we try and push the emotions down. So when a problem comes up, we just go into fix it mode straight away because that's what we're good at. And in doing that, we quite often miss the connection. So especially our partner has got something going on and they want to be able to express themselves. We jump in and try and fix it. And of course there's a clash. And it's a case of really just asking our partners as well, do you want me to fix this or do you want me to listen? And if they just want a vent, hey, they just told you it's got nothing to do with you because they don't want you to fix it. Because therefore it's not a problem that's come up that you have the ability to fix and it's not something that you've done wrong.

So we just hold their space and listen. That in itself is the best part of communicating. Stop and listen to people.

Yeah, it goes back to our pre wiring. If we go right back to tribal times, we were the protectors, we were the fixers, et cetera, and the women were the nurturers. We were trained that way. It didn't have DNA. And so this is one of the reasons why we have this misunderstanding. Women are so focused on the nurturing and listening and all the rest of it, whereas word men are wired to actually jump in and fix it. If we went back and realized that first of all and said, okay, this is our predisposition is to take this direction or that direction. When we look at the two genders and there's a case of them all going, okay, the other gender is different than me, so let me find out how they do things and understand that. And if the women did that with us and we did that with the women, we'd have much better relationships.

And I tell you what, I wish I'd known all of this long before I got, as I said in the conversation before, I've been through two divorces and a lot of broke relationships before I learned how to read people and understand all this. So, yes, if anyone's listening, learn from my mistakes, please.

Well, as I was saying, it was from those broken relationships and things after my second divorce, I thought helping them, working with our national telephone carrier long before I'd met her. And in there, I was put in charge of men who are older than me, and I had to get them on. So I said body language. I've been using that in the 70s. In the 80s, I got involved with psychometric profiling at Myers Briggs and disc profiling. And I was always looking for something better than those. And then in the 90s, did my NLP masters. And in the early 2000s, that was straight after my second divorce, I just realized I needed better ways of reading people. I had some skills, but it wasn't the full picture of what I needed. And somebody said to me one day when I was doing a workshop, you ever looked at reading faces?

And that set me on the path to understanding the facial features and understanding the micro expressions, the little twitches on our face that expose our emotions. And so I put all that studying those two areas of them, put it together with what I'd already had and create the rapid, rapid trait profiling. So since I've had that in place, all of my relationships are completely changed because now I understand the other person. I take that time to listen to them. And a good example of that and practice I had was in the campfire project listening to other people tell their stories they never told before. In that situation, you have to sit and listen. You can't interrupt. So I've actually, through the campfire project, that also helped me to really build that skill of just sitting, listening, and holding somebody's space.

Well, I'm a bit slower than some people. Sometimes to learn a lesson, it's got to be beaten in with a mallet. Here it comes again. I've done this before. Yeah. And he would do it again. I keep going around the same cycle, and I realized that that was just not the way to do things. But now I would have liked to have done things differently in that earlier on, but I don't know what my future would have been. I am the man I am today because of what I've been through in the past, and I like who I am today. So all that stuff in the past. Yeah. Well, that had to be part of my process to get to where I am. But if other people can learn from my mistakes, they'll get to where they want to go faster. That's why I decided I needed to teach people how to build their relationships. Because the best person to ever go and learn something from is somebody who's got the experience in it. And, boy, did I have some experiences.

Well, if we don't, you know, that's when things slow down really fast. It's like many years ago, they said that when men retired, they would last 2.7 years and have about $2,700 in the bank at the time when they retired, that was what they expected. And I looked at and thought, right, well, if I retire means that I've got 2.7 years. So if I don't retire, I can live forever. So I've had that approach that I'm going to keep working, but to keep working, I've also got to keep learning as well, because otherwise the work becomes boring. And so I realized that things are happening around us all the time. The only guaranteed consistency is changed everything else. That's the most important thing. So if you understand that things are going to be keep changing all the time, new experiences and everything, we're going to be learning from all of those. Some things are going to be subtle, some things are going to be major, but as long as you're open to it.

And that's part of life because that's where the enjoyment comes in. Those little changes, those little things that happen, that's where I go, wow, I didn't experience that before, so now I've experienced something new. So a bit more pleasure and a few more learnings as well.

It's knowing, having an idea of, okay, I realized if I retired, what am I going to do? I'm not into golf and things like that. I was always into the surf and all the rest of it. But I'm in my 70s now and I'm finding that I'm not as fit as I used to be. The joints are playing up and everything else. Rotor cuff problems and all the rest of it. So I don't want to be caught out in the surf and then trying to get back to shore. So a lot of things I've had to put aside. And so in that I thought, well, right, what am I going to do? And I thought, well, I love doing what I'm doing and. But I don't want to do the travel I've been doing in the past. I don't want to be on stage doing talks all the time in different parts of the world. I need to actually do something different. So I thought radio. The skills need to be shared. So now I'm creating and training my competition so that they can go out and do that work.

So I'm duplicating myself and changing my role at the same time. My whole business is about building relationships and that's what I'm doing. I'm creating so many relationships around me. People who are just as passionate as I am about helping people and to grow their futures, et cetera, to. I'll have that for the rest of my life. And so it's always finding a pathway to get there. Don't lose your skills. Because in the Campfire project, the oldest guy I interviewed was 99 years old. His stories were absolutely incredible of what he went through. His career was. He was an accountant, so nothing really exciting, but things that he did around that poetry he wrote about his children and things like that future generations needed to hear, that other people outside of his family would have got so much value from it as well. And this is the problem. As we get older, we think that our identity is going because that's what we're focusing on.

We've lost the identity, but we've realized that if we only realize that we have so much knowledge and so much to share, that would become a new role again. So with your neighbor, the knowledge you would have around that being able to teach would be absolutely brilliant.

What you were just saying there with the retaining stuff and not sharing it, et cetera. On the facial features side of things, the lady I trained with, she was part of an institution over there. Other people who had trained all of them kept their material close to their chest. She's the only one who was willing to share it. And she taught me. And she looked at me as being somebody who would take over what she was doing. The end result was, I remembered hearing one of the other ladies was retiring and instead of passing, all of, she had boxes of material, of information, of research, et cetera. And instead of passing it on, she sent it to the tip. Nobody was going to get it. And this was the whole thing. All of them keeping their stuff so much to themselves. My view is that as you mentioned before, all this stuff has been written down by somebody else. It goes back further and further.

If we look at say like Richard Branson talking about if you want to look after your customers, put your rastar first, because they're the ones that look after your customer. If they're happy, your customers are happy. It's a paradigm, a thought that most people can't get their eyes head around. If I look after my customers, then I'm going to lose business. But if I look after my staff, I'm actually putting my customers first. I'm putting my staff first. And I realized that with those sort of approaches, what Richard said there, that goes back centuries, back to Millennial. It's been set over and over. So all the stuff that we do today has been repeated over and over again in different formats from different people. So all this IP that I've got and some of it that I've created myself, is it really mine? My attitude to it is no. We have an obligation to everybody else around us. We're part of a community.

The way I look at things is the old saying that if you want to, what you say you create for yourself dies with you. But what you create for others and for the community isn't always, will be eternal. By helping other people, it feeds you as well. I sit and talk to people about the issues I've never been able to talk to about before. And I'll sit there for hours with people talking. I've spent with campfire project over 700 hours in the last seven years putting that time and just listening to people who are saying that. That's a wonderful thing. And I'm going, hang on. I've got these people trust me. So they're showing me that much trust in everything else. I am so grateful for having had the opportunity to sit there with them, hold their space while they tell their stories. This is what brings us together. The more I can help other people, the better my life is, because all those people around me, if they're happy, my environment's happy.

Yeah, we all want to have a good life. We all want to be able to be comfortable and things like that. But how much do you need? The way I look at it, I got my bills paid. I was told many years ago when I was growing up that all you needed was one more dollar coming in than you had going out. If you had all your bills and everything else paid, you were living the same lifestyle as somebody else who had billions of dollars because they couldn't spend all of that money anyway. You can't take it to the grave with you. I know the Egyptians tried it, but then that got stolen from their tombs. Anyway, so the end result is that, you know, share the things with people because when those people around you, your life is enriched with the relationships that you end up creating.

Well, we're working with particularly men in business, men of our age, et cetera. When I asked them, okay, tell us what, give us some idea of your life, your home life and business life, what are some of the issues, et cetera. And I was getting all sorts of stuff, okay, just give me one word. And the two words that kept coming back all the time for all these people was frustration and confusion. And I went, well, tell me about your personal life. What about this confusion, this frustration? They said, well, yeah, we were told, especially gen X and baby boomers, we were taught to go out from the family, go and work our childs off to bring the resources back. So we showed our love by being absent. And then today we're told, well, you're supposed to be home. Where are you physically emotional and emotionally absent? And that was causing frustration because the guys were home.

Unless they can work from home, thanks to Covid, if they were working at home, they weren't bringing the resources in. And so there was complaints about we haven't got enough, we've got lack and everything else. So they go out and they bring the Resources, now they're absent again. They said, we can't be in two places at once at the same time. In the workplace, the men were always trying to do the right thing, but they said with gender equality and political correctness, what they were. You know, they can talk in a certain way yesterday, but today, if they talk that same way, the gold posts have probably been moved, and now they're in trouble for doing something they didn't even know was a problem in the first place. And so we get accused of something before we get taught what the right way to do it is. And so that was causing frustration. It was getting to the point there was a lot of anger in the workplace.

It was even getting domestic violence at home from those arguments that came from that. Because when you're so aggravated and you've been pushed into a corner, you don't know everything you do is wrong, you strike out. And so that was a lot of the issues we have are caused from that. So I thought radio. The men need to be able to get this out of themselves. You know, sitting there and looking at the wall and going through it, just builds it inside. But to have somebody to listen, hold your space allows a person to be able to, you know, gives them the permissions for themselves to explain it and express it. My job was to facilitate a safe place. Their job was then to give themselves permission to tell their stories. When they did that, I just told their space and listen to their story.

So without judgment, without counseling, without telling their right or wrong or anything else, but just so they knew that a human being had actually heard them, that they weren't on their own. And quite often those conversations, they would actually work out what new things they needed to do. And so many conversations I've had with people, they've said to me at the end of it, that's the best therapy I've ever had. And I go, well, if you want to thank the therapist, get off the call, go look in the mirror and say thank you to yourself. Because you finally started, your conscious mind, started to listen to your unconscious mind, finally. And so it knows the answers and everything else, but you'll be ignoring it because of all this clutter and everything else that's going on in the real world. And so listen to it.

And then I brought them into panel discussions, and we started talking about masculinity, femininity, all the different toxicities, et cetera, drugs, alcohol. And we're having some great conversations now. I didn't want it to be a men's group because men's groups and women's groups have their place. They're extremely important because you need to go to those, especially when you're lowest, you need to go to somewhere where you feel safe. And men will feel safe around other men, women will feel safe around other women. So we needed those groups. But like motivational seminars, we go to those, we get all excited and everything goes. We go home, we get smacked in the face by the real world again, and we're waiting for the next seminar. And that's what I found with a lot of men's and women's groups. I thought, right, those groups will do their work. But after that, where do you go to next? Well, you don't know.

As a man, we don't know whether we've got it all together until we're back in our community. And I want to talk to our partners and the people around us, you know, the children, all the rest of it. So I thought, right, let's make it a safe place. So I had women in there from day one. But I didn't interview the women deliberately because I knew if the women started talking, men would feel intimidated, because it's not something that we were out to do in the past was to share our stories. So I knew the men that wouldn't speak, but I also wanted the women to hear how men could speak when the men felt safe to do so. And so the end result, once we got into the panel discussions, that's when I definitely started getting calls from the women going, we love these guys. We've never heard men talk so deeply about their emotions or so wisely about how to improve society. We haven't had those conversations before. We want to be part of it.

And I went, right, jump in, put your hands up, tell your stories. And if you tell your stories, you can join the panel discussions. Because I don't endorse anybody who comes in. What they do is they get credibility by telling people who they are, what they've been through. And then from that, a lot of those that have come in and told their stories, men and women, are now doing joint ventures together, those are in business, et cetera. And people who were listening to them have now gone to some of those who are coaches for support and for therapy. And so all these people have started connecting together in the middle of COVID When I turned 70, they pulled a surprise birthday party for me, and we had people from all over the world coming in and saying that if either the campfire project or my profiling had not saved Their lives. It at least changed their lives.

And I found a book downstairs as an exercise book a couple of days ago because I'm coming up to another birthday shortly. And in that, I had a quick flip through it. And on every page of this exercise book, they've dressed it up, They've put pasted in the comments from people. And the whole exercise book is fully filled of accolades from the beginning of the book to the end of the book, except for one or two blank pages. Wow. But this is where you looked at it. Instead of going, oh, the glass is half empty. Oh, they didn't finish off the last couple of pages. I might go, oh, look at all the other pages. My God, that many people made that many comments. And so it depends on where you put your focus as well. And the campfire project has helped a lot of people change where their focus was, and that's helped for them to be able to change their lives.

Yep, the one on ones, because people were telling some horrific stories. Like one young fellow who was. Or older fella now, when he was six years old, he was sold for sex by his brother and that those raids went on for three years. So to tell those sort of stories, and the physical and emotional abuse from his mother over brother until he finally left home, all these stories, some of them being extremely deep. And so it'd be very difficult for them to tell their stories. They have to be protected. Now, the group itself, we've got a web page where people can find out about it, but the group itself is on Facebook. And so being on Facebook, and we know that trolls, people who like to be weekend warriors and get their frustrations out by having attacks at other people. I had to protect all these people from them. So I created a closed group. But to get into the group, you have to answer two questions. And the two questions are pretty much the same.

It's really just asking people, will they respect everybody? And people said, well, why did you ask the same question twice? I went, there's your two chances. You don't get a third. Anybody, any disrespect, you're out. Because in the group, we have all the different gender identities, religions, cultures, people from all over the world. And so with that, we've. We get past our problems by having conversations and understanding the other person. I can sit down with anybody with any sort of background that they've got, listen to them to understand why they made the decisions they did, what their life was like, et cetera. Some of the things they may have done might have been quite horrific towards other people. I'm not listening to work out whether they're right or wrong. Understand them first of all. And then I can hear the stories that you tell without making judgments on them.

And that was the most important thing, because some of the people who were doing things in their life that weren't in line with being the best way going forward started reevaluating the way they were doing things and going, well, maybe I shouldn't be doing things that way. I should be doing it this way. And they're the ones that I'm not telling them what to do. Which is great, because as they work it out themselves, they take ownership of it, and they're more likely to take action on it. In seven years now, over 700 hours of conversations, one on ones and panel discussions. So the one on one state, I'd do an interview with somebody. So if it was just you and me, we'd be doing that on Zoom. I'd record it at the end of it. My first question to you would be, are you happy with this conversation? Are you happy with other people hearing it? And people said to me, well, what happens if I'm not? I said, I'll delete it.

And they said, is that wasted your time? No, my job was to hold your space so you could tell the story you haven't been able to tell before. Job's done. If others get to hear it, that's a bonus because I guarantee it's a bonus for them because they're going to, you know, they'll see some connection in there for themselves, some answers, but they'll also be. It'll be a bonus for you because the comments you'll get back from them, I know it'll be all supportive, so you'll know that you're definitely not on your own anymore. But then I'll put it in the closed group. But to get it, you've got to be in the closed group. And those two questions, and what's the reason why? We've never had any abuse from anybody. As I said, no bigotry, sexism, or racism. And not once in 700 hours of conversations. Anybody being disrespectful to anyone else.

That's it.

Because every time I hear these people tell their stories and they go, well, you know, I'm pretty much ashamed of this. And I go, hang on. Did you deliberately make a bad decision or did you make the Best decision you did with the information you have. And they go, of course I didn't deliberately make a bad one. I made it on the information I had and go, well, where's the shame? How can you be ashamed of something you didn't know about? And therefore, yes, you can regret it. So even just in that little conversation, it shifts them from these years of trying to get therapy around the shame they're carrying to realizing shame didn't exist in the first place, but something that's been dumped onto them or they've been expected to take up as being their issue and realizing, no, this is just something that I regret. Now I know how that the better way of doing it, I won't do it that way anymore, I'll do it this way. And this is.

That's just therapy in its own. When people just realize that themselves that, yes, take the regret. There's a lot of regret that I've got in my life, but there's not one thing that I look back on that I've got any shame for.

Yeah, well, the panel discussions, they're actually in a YouTube channel as well, because the panel discussions, the people aren't just talking about all this stuff that holding them back all that time. Now we're talking about all the different issues around life. We've even had conversations around menstruation, menopause, does size matter in the bedroom, all of those sort of conversations. And usually there's a lot of laughter with that as well. So people aren't talking about their dark secrets. So with those, we put those out so the public can see those as well. It's a bit of an interest to say, come on in, but we also had a radio, a digital radio station in Newcastle and a digital radio station in the central coast who were replaying them at lunchtime. They asked me if we could. They could play them every lunchtime for weeks. They just played one after the other. And at 12 o' clock, and it was. It was brilliant.

So a lot of people trained that are out there came into the group, sitting there listening to some of the other one on ones and realized, okay, probably time for me now to share my story as well. And that's how we've grown.

It'll be eight years this coming August.

Well, when it comes down to it, first of all, we're made up of two areas of our personality. One is the nature and one is the nurture. The nature is the physical features that we have that were passed down in our DNA from our parents. We know that every memory we have is stored in every cell of our body. So at the time we were conceived, every memory our parents have was passed down to us. So those people who talk about life, past life experiences, yeah, it could have been one of your ancestors further back. So for those that are more of a scientific mind, there's the explanation on that side then you have the more esoteric who go well no, I lived that life in a previous life, et cetera. But the end result is that all of our memories are passed down in the cell. So our nature traits are already set in place as far as what we're going to look like. So we'll have similarities. Like I'm not going to have a child.

If I have a child they're not going to look Chinese unless my partner is Chinese. Both my ex partners were English or are English women and in that particular case we're going to have English looking kids. And so there's your nature side. But then we have our nurture side which is how we decide to respond to all the events in our life. So when we're thinking we're going to pull an expression over and over and over again because that's the way we like to think. I get really involved in what I'm doing. I really try to get all the gist of it's got to be exactly right. So by doing this, I'm pulling my eyebrows together, I'm creating these lines and everything else. The more I concentrate, the more I've studied, the more I have this serious on my face. It's pulled the eyelids down. Not just age, but the fact that the muscles keep pulling down.

If I smile all the time, the corner of my mouth is going to turn up because these muscles up here will get stronger and the muscles down below will stretch because these are getting shorter and stronger. So to get equilibrium, corner of the mouth goes up. If I'm really happy and joyful, besides being out in the sun and squinting all the time, if I'm really happy and joyful, I'll get those lines out the corner of the eyes, you know, the laughter lines, or some people like to call them crow's feet. And by the way, when I'm talking to older women and that, and they've got those lines, I say, ladies, they talk about beauty going to being skin deep and ugly going all the way to the bone. But those lines of beauty that goes all the way to the bone, if you don't have those, it means you've had a miserable life. You never really smile. If you're a happy person, the muscles around your eyes go really tight. And that's why we get those wrinkles.

And so if you've got those wrinkles and the mouth is turned up, I know you're going to be a fairly happy person. If you've got those wrinkles and the mouth is turned down, I realize that, hey, you've been going through some tough times recently. Most of your life you've been happy. But more recently, things have been going wrong. You could have been made redundant, you could have lost a partner, you could have lost a child, all those sort of things, good friends, et cetera, have gone another way. And so with all of that, the face is going to react to it. And so some of the nurture ones that I can see or the nature ones I can see in you is the length of the filtrum underneath your nose. The longer this area is down here, the drier that width that person is likely to have. So I know that in a conversation, the moment I saw you, when you came on screen the very first day we met, I thought, God, here's a man I can throw something at.

Doug, he's going to be able to throw it back at me. This is going to be a bit of a fun time. And I know that it was going to be jovial. If I'm talking to somebody else who's got a shorter one, I know they're a little bit more fussy about things and they can get their nose out of joint if I say something that doesn't really go right with them. So with you, you'll throw something back at me if you don't agree with it, etc. Whereas somebody else might get really upset about it. If I can recognize that, I go, hey, okay, Alan, what I'm about to say, could this offend somebody? My drive with. I just want to be fun, be friends with people and have a bit of fun. And so I recognize, oh, I might not say that to that person. I might be a little bit more cautious. But I know that when I look at you in the exposure of the eyelids, the eyelids have come down and they sort of. The eyelash goes underneath on yours, it's all exposed.

So I know that you just like the overview. If I give you a started giving you a lecture about something, gave you this item and all the depth of it and next item and all the depth of it, you're going to be saying, yes, yes, yes to me. And they're going to be counterfeit yeses, because all you want me to do is shut up and move on. You're going to be saying, yes, but what about the rest of it? Whereas if you're talking to me and I wasn't aware of this and you would just give me the overview, because I know if I give you the overview, if you're interested in it, then you will ask questions. But if you just started giving the overview, I'm likely to stop you and go, hang on, give me a bit more about this thing. So I keep trying to drag you back. You can see why there's some clashes and people get angry with each other when they're trying to get their messages across.

But I would know if I had a lot of information for you, I'd say, look, Doug, there's a lot of information here. I could probably see the sweat starting to appear on your face. And I go, but you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you the overview and then you can ask all the questions that you want to ask. That's what I can guarantee. Your shoulders will drop, you'll feel a lot more comfortable, but then I'll add to it. So if I've got some things that I've got to tick certain boxes, like I'm a. Sorry, I'm a financial planner. And I've got to give you, you know, make sure it covers some of the legal aspects. Well, I'd say that, you know, I'm going to let you ask all the questions you want to ask, but if there's something there that you haven't asked that you need to know that I think you need to know, is it all right if I tell you that then? So straight away, we've got a bit of a contract in the conversation.

You know that I'm not going to be lecturing you. You know that you're going to be able to communicate with me instead of me lecturing at you because you're going to be asking me questions. Then when we get through that, I go, okay, Doug, well, remember I mentioned before, there might be a couple of things there that you didn't ask that you need to know. That boring stuff. We're there now. Is that okay? And I usually get a bit of a, you know, a yes and a giggle. So they know that they've controlled her all the way through by asking the questions. And I've just got this stuff I've got to do whether I like it or not. And so it's a nice, easy conversation. And so if I was selling to you, I know it would take a lot less time selling to you than it would be selling to me because I need all this extra information. So in your case, you would recognize that in my face and say, look, Alan, there is a lot of information here.

You're going to have a lot of questions. But look, because I want to make sure I don't forget anything. I want to put it all on the table for you. I'm just going to lay it out and then we'll go back and we'll go in depth and leave the item. If you did that and then I interrupted partway through, you could say to me, look, Alan, as I said before, for me to make sure I don't forget anything, I just got to get on the table first. And it's important that I don't forget anything. And that's gotta be important to you as well, hasn't it? You get a yes from me. We're back to the contract. We had to work in the way we're going to do the conversation. So this is the beautiful part of it. It teaches us how to communicate with the other person. There is the old golden rule, which is treat others as you would have them treat you. This is a respect side of things. But the platinum rule is treat others as they would have you treat them.

So in other words, when it comes to communication, you have to talk in their language. If we listen to a radio station, we know it's got a frequency coming out. So we tune our receivers into it that when we're talking, we don't have a set frequency that people know to tune in. We therefore have to tune into where their receiver is sitting. And the face tells us all of that. Because I know once you've done that quick overview, you'll make your decisions pretty quickly. And then also your face is telling me you've driven by action. Just give me the best way to do it, get the hell out of the way and let me get it done. So I'm not going to hit you with all the different possibilities. I might say, oh, there's these different possibilities, but this one I've done the research on. This is why I reckon it's the best.

It is. See, one of the things I learned a long time ago that was that our physiology and our neurology are linked. So whatever we feel, we exhibit in our body as well. When I started, long before I got into the face profiling side of things, my second wife had talked me into becoming a massage therapist. She used to teach massage and aromatherapy. And so I learned the craft. And then in that I realized that when I had people coming to me and they were talking about injuries and things that they had and we started talking. So I take them through an NLP process first and then put them on the table. And you know, the massage and oils and sound therapy, color therapy and everything else. And I realized there was a connection to everything. And so things like if you've got skin problems, for instance, we know that that's usually due to self esteem issues. We know if there's anger, more likely that your liver's going to cough it.

If you've got relationship problems, it'll hit you in the kidneys. Because every thought we have in our daily life creates a chemical reaction and those chemicals are always going to be different. So happiness has a different chemical reaction to anger. And so those chemicals will go around and hit different organs of the body and doctors. When I first started talking to one doctor about this, oh, that's a load of rubbish. And I said, hang on, mate, if I come to you with a kidney problem, are you going to give me a liver pill? He goes, no, of course I'll give you something for your kidneys. I said, why? He said, because it's chemically attuned for that organ. And as he was talking and I said, and every thought we have is a chemical reaction, and each thought we have is a different chemical. He went oh, as he was talking, his voice just dropped off and he went, oh, now I get it.

And that was the thing that really drove it home to me, is that if we feel a certain way, it's going to affect us outside. If we think misery in all the time we're watching the major different horrible news and everything else is going to affect us, it's going to come out in our posture. The way we say it, it's going to. The corner of the mouth is going to start turning down because we frown a lot all the time. So one of the things when I was working with terminally all patients and some of them were reversing their conditions, this really got me going with wanting to know more about this was realizing that if somebody was have, you know, well, had one guy who had stomach cancer and he kept on using the same comment all the time. He was a painter. He worked in the commercial painter in the middle of gfc, struggling with business and everything because he was an elder in his church, hearing everyone's problems.

And he kept on saying, I've had a gut fall. Well, it's no wonder he had stomach cancer because that's where he kept. Yeah, that's where his focus was. Well, I got him to stop watching his news. I got him to start talking to his wife. I said, when you come home from work, what do you do? He said, I go and sit down, watch the news and my wife's preparing dinner. I said, well, did you always do this? He said, no. When we first got together, I used to, you know, we prepare food together, so. Well, why don't you go and prepare. Prepare food with her? He said, she's a much better cook than me. I said, yeah, but do you like a bottle of. A glass of wine? He said, yes. I said, we'll go home, knock a bottle off the top off the bottle, pour a glass for her and for you, sit in the kitchen and talk to her while she's preparing dinner. And I said, and stop watching the news because we know you can't change. If you can't change it, stop doing it.

If there's something happening around me, I will take notice of it. And if it's something I can make a change with, I will get in there. But if not, then I'm going to stay away from. Because I know it's going to affect me because I'm highly emotional and I get that and I take it inside and then it starts affecting me. And so I realized. And he did that. And three months later, he came back to me. And the sender that sent him to me looking after his medicines and everything else told him his cancer is reversing. So your thoughts have that powerful an impact on you. And so they're either going to feed you or they're going to eat you. It's your choice.

Well, you know, that's why I try to be as happy as I can. I had one photo one day that was taken. I got these lines down the side of my face. It looked like somebody dragged a rake down it. And most people would look at it and go, oh, geez, I need a better photo. And I looked and I thought, wow, what was I thinking then? I'm trying to remember what I was thinking because I wanted to think that way again. Because you don't get those lines unless you're in deep enjoyment. And I know when I'm in deep enjoyment, my life is so much better. It's like if you go and work out and level of fitness, walking and doing other things, you'll feel better as well. Everything is linked.

All the expressions you pull are going to work those muscles. You're going to reshape the muscle structure, you're going to reshape the surface appearance as well. And so that's the one thing to remember. But if you do, you know, always think about doing just that. Design your own future. We are sculptors. Every last one of these are sculptors. And we can sculpt our face, et cetera, to be the Way we want by just changing those expressions over and over. Yeah, I profiled a lady the other day and she was talking about. I profiled her daughter, I should say. Her daughter's got these. Only young girls got these lines coming downhill already. And so I talked about. I know that when the. My first wife was in June, darling Watkins, all that deportment stuff that were back in those days. And she used to walk around with a pencil in her mouth because when you put a pencil in the mouth, it causes you to actually smile and the muscles up here get stronger.

I told this woman about it, she came back a couple of weeks later and she said her daughter's been walking around the house with a pencil in her mouth every day ever since she was told about it. And she said even just the sparkle in her eyes has changed. And I'm imagining right.

Well, one of the things that was. It changes your posture. So your shoulders are going to go back, you're going to stand more erect, you're going to walk in a more rhythmic movement, et cetera, instead of bouncing all over the place. But if you do, that thing's going to fall off. And while you're doing that, you've got yourself up more erect, et cetera. We know that when we're unhappy, we slump. So straight away, try and think of. When you're walking around like that, try and think of a really bad time, something that was really unhappy, you'll find that your body will very quickly do the same thing. It'll join it because they're linked. So by putting both shoulders back and walking around, you know, not being, you know, this obnoxious pride, et cetera, but just having confidence in yourself straight away, your whole demeanor change, changes. And they've been doing that, your whole life changes from there.

So I always say to people, I remember when I was growing up, my mother had walked past and I've been working on something. I have an expression of really trying to get my head around things. And she used to say to me, alan, if the Wind changes. You're going to be stuck with that, folks. And I thought now I realize later on that for the first 25 years of our life, from 0 to 25, we have the face our parents gave us. From 25 to 50, we have the face that we gave ourselves. So we have choice because yes, we have our nature that was passed down to us from the DNA from our parents. But the nurture side is how we have decided to respond to our environment. It's our choice no matter what people do around us. If I hear somebody said, oh, so and so did such and such to me and caused me to do this, I'm going, nobody caused you to do anything. Yes, if somebody hit me with a stick, I'm going to feel the physical pain, et cetera.

How I then respond to that and carry that around. If somebody does the wrong thing by me, how many years am I going to carry that anger around? So they do it to me once and I carry it then doing it to myself every day after that. So I realized that if I got the choice of being able to look at something going right, that was what they did. I then chose to be this way. I don't choose to do that. I'm going to choose to do this instead. The moment I do that, this is letting things go very quickly. There's an old saying about, you know, if you really want to get better, forgive the other person. Which is not about them, it's all about you just saying, hey, they no longer that hold over me. And as soon as you do that, your whole attitude changes, chemicals change in your body, health improves the whole bit. So we are the masters of our own lives.

Yeah, well, I think a lot of the kids, you know, you pull a face when your parents say something. You put that, you know, throw an expression of one form or another on your face. And I think it was our way of Our parents scaring us out of doing that. Because, you know, if you go, yeah, that sort of thing on your face, you don't want to be stuck like that for the rest of your life, do you?

Yeah, that was, I think that was one of their control things. It was like, you know, if you did something wrong, your mother would say to you, wait till your father gets home. That'd put terror into your life. So you'd stop doing whatever it was you were doing because you knew the consequences. So I think it was just a way of developing cause and effect, you know, consequences of your actions.

Yeah, intuition's got a whole bunch of things connected to it. It's like if you're listening to somebody and they're talking and everything seems to be fine, but you have that gut feeling something's not right. Unconsciously we have picked up non verbal indicators, their body language and other things like that. And somebody will say, oh, intuitively thought knew they weren't a good person. Well, our intuition is also our unconscious mind talking to us. What it's picking up, we take in what, 2 billion bits of information every second. The numbers are right or not, doesn't matter, it's a percentage. But we only handle about 134 bits. It's only one 15,000. So there's so much stuff going on, we generalize to distort and delete stuff, to be able to survive each day. And in doing that, there's a whole lot of stuff that we're seeing, but we're not taking it in, so we're picking that up as well.

But intuition, just having that, being connected to the universe, you might say, in some ways. So for me, mine started at the age of 50 when I went through my second divorce and all this. Then I opened my massage practice up a few years later. The end result was I had a lot of people, as I said, who were terminally all coming to me and some reversing their conditions, which to me was bizarre. I went out and I wanted some answers to that and I realized that western medicine, what didn't have any answers, they were all confused about why people who were on chemotherapy and that coming to me was still growing hair while they're on chemo. It was unheard of, why they were actually Getting fitter, and I was supposed to be getting worse as far as the medical doctors were saying. And I realized at that point I needed answers. So what have we got here in Australia? I didn't want to go off to an ashram or whatever it is over in India and places like that.

We've got the oldest living culture here on the planet. And so I managed to connect with some aboriginal groups. They invited me out bush. That led on to going out each weekend to learn culture, to understand more about them, but also to get answers in the work I was doing. And every time I went out, we were put to a test of one form or another. We might have been told, okay, there's a sacred site over there and the thing might only be a couple of meters square type thing. And they said it was in that direction and it could have been a kilometer walking through the bush. The number of times we found it and the people who were directing us were behind us, they weren't in front of us. We had no indication from them. We had to find it ourselves. And the number of times we did that was I just went, this is incredible. So I knew there was a connection outside of that. So there's so many things we've got.

If we look at intuition, it's a minefield of all the different things that are connected. It's our unconscious mind, it's our observations, all these different things. And so have I tried to work it all out? No, I just accept it.

That's it. And the more I've understood people, the more I've been able to trust my intuition. Because if somebody, in that first instance, if somebody has said something around you and everything sounds fine, but you've got that gut feeling something's wrong. There could be a couple of reasons. Unconsciously, they remind you of somebody in the past who's done the wrong thing by you, or you've picked up all the unconscious, what do you call it, non verbals, all those indicators that have told you that they're not telling the truth. Well, with the profiling I do is I just teach people how to tell the difference. Is it their intuition or is it their bias? Did they pick it up? Is it real or is it imaginary, or is it a past experience coming back to haunt them type thing. Because most of us don't deal with the crap we've been through in our lives.

One of the reasons why they say today that most of the problems we have go back to the first seven years of life.

Well, as we said before about all the information out there is really, it's the world, it's not just ours. And as I said, I'm looking at changing the direction in which I'm doing things. I'm now creating and training my competition. So I'm always looking for people who have a focus on other people. It's usually I find the ones that are most focused on other people aren't the ones, the other ones who aren't making the money. So I've set up a program where I can find those people. They're the ones I really want to train and they can afford doing this so they can then go out and teach other people. But you know, as I said, there's always plenty going on. The book I've got that you mentioned, it's been on the. Been out for many, many years and it was based on the face. It was all about how to be able to pick the right careers, going to the right fields that match your personality.

Well, I'm working with a school at the moment and in that I'll be training the principal and one of the head teachers at the primary school and the preschool. They now want to put a program together for the school. So they said, right, can you give us some ideas? And I started writing things down. I thought, right, I better look at all the traits that come in at different ages and where we can then start looking at those. Well, the last couple of weeks I've written another almost 200 page book on how to raise the children, all the different traits, how to read them, all the different things where the parents can step in, where the teachers can play their role and everything else. Once I get the faces that I'm looking for, that book will be out then. So that will be far more current than the one that's out there on the Internet at the moment. But I do have a free course on my platform.

I'm getting a lot of pressure from one of the other training groups that I work with, they've already got my free course and put a price on it. So they've been pushing me to put a price on mine as well. But right at the moment it's a 28 minute course to get through. It teaches a number of traits that people can go out and apply and try for themselves and figure out whether, you know, it works for them. And because I always say to people, I can sit and talk about all the stuff that I can do, I can be really convincing and everything helps. But one of the, another one of my mother's sayings was that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Somebody can talk about how great a chef they are, but until you sink your teeth into the food that they've talked about, you don't know whether they're any good or not.

And so that's why I thought, right, this free course for people to be able to learn a little bit about for themselves, test it out, make their own decision from there and then talk to me after that if they'd like to do that. So I'll give you that link as well. In the moment, I'm going to hold off for about a couple of weeks and then I'll be paying a price on it. But if I do, I'll also send through a coupon code where the people who listen to this now can get it for free.

Yeah.

Looks at a couple of traits, gives a bit of an idea there. But also the links to the campfire project, come and check that out as well. And just remember, if you are going through tough times, find the right sort of person who has your interest. Not somebody who's going to tell you you're right or you're wrong or anything else, but somebody who is willing to just sit there and hold your space and show you that you're not there on your own. And that's the beginning of taking the first step forward.

Well, I'll just add to that very quickly, if I may. Out of the campfire project, we also had the business of smiles Charity that came out that grew out of that, which I'm a director on. And one of the things. And if you want to have a laugh sometime and see me out in the streets wearing a pair of shorts with my white English legs, because they're very white these days, big smiley T shirt, and wearing a pair of these socks, if you don't start grinning and laughing and that something's wrong, and if you grin and laugh, I'm going to walk over to you, I'll have a pair of these socks in my hand. And this is what we do in the business of smiles. We walk up to people, we thank them for doing the best that they could. And music people say, what are you talking about?

Well, in your life, in raising your children, in your business, with your work colleagues, et cetera, with your partners, do you do the thing from the information you have, do you try and do the right thing all the time, or do you deliberately do bad things? Because we did the right thing. Okay, for that, I want to gift you a pair of socks and say thank you for doing your best. Now, the story of the socks, that's the only payment they've got to give us, is to listen to us talk. The story. Little black dots, your dark days, you're not getting out of them. They're coming one way or another. But the yellow is like the winter sun on our back, that warmth that keeps us going on those cold days. It's also the support that you give others and others give us. And when we've got that. Got that support around us, just like the yellow keeps the black dots separate, the support keeps our dark days from turning into a bleak life.

So it's a reminder to find the right people, the right company to be around. The people who don't just tell you you're right or wrong, but the people who will hold your space and listen to you. And we ended up 2000 pairs after the floods in Lismore in 22 and in seven days and started 2000 conversations there. And then that Christmas, we went to Melbourne in a place called Frankston, which had the biggest world record for the number of days in lockdown during COVID we handed out two and a half thousand pairs and we had people because we were in the same area each day, we had people we give them to one day walking past us and yelling out, pulling their trouser legs up and showing off their socks and everything else. And people coming over to us to catch up with us because it changed their lives. They just realized that we are a community we are all connected.

Well, all of that came out of our pocket, plus also we had some people who were supporting us and gave us some sponsorship as well. So we're now looking at some. Well, we've got a website. We haven't got any. We've got these shirts as well. We haven't got any socks or shirts at the moment. We're going to get some more. They'll go on sale and then virtually when the ones where people were buying them, one pair that we sold would then get us two or some number of them, just get us a couple of extras. And we were starting to grow that way. But it was our passion project. By the campfire project, my passion project, I introduced two guys who started the business of smiles as a business. Then they came to me and said, hey, can we, how about we turn this into a charity? Can you be a director with us? And so we then took it to that next level. And again, that was another passion project for us. We've got some more people coming as directors.

We're looking at getting more sponsoring around us and we've already got the socks. I've had visitors from overseas, I had people, I've sent them to overseas and people who are showing off the socks in the meetings they're at and all the rest of it and it's been brilliant.

Everybody's carrying stuff. I went up to one guy, he was well over 6 foot, he was a big security guard and he got pick handle across the shoulders. I'm only 5 foot 6, so I really looked hilarious, the two of us standing side by side, especially the way I was dressed. And I went through that process with him and then his whole body just slumped. And he told me how he lost his son and his wife that year during COVID And so we sat in the gutter in the car park. So we sat in the curb there and just had a long yard. And so just the way his whole face softened. He went from being tough and Everything else to then dropping with the emotion and then softening as we were talking and everything goes. And the genuine person. You could see the strength the guy had, but you also saw the beauty he had that he probably couldn't see in himself. That's another reason why I love the profile.

Because I'm looking for people's strengths so I see where their gifts are, help them to find those gifts, but at the same time be able to understand the downside of their traits so they can then be aware of that. So they take dominion over their traits instead of their traits controlling them. Everything just comes together. Everything I do is based on relationships and everything's connected.

Well, thanks very much. The world's full of the things that you do. Everybody who's listening to this, don't think that you have to do something monumental or get out and do a whole lot of stuff to make a difference in this world. Just being a great father, being a great mother, et cetera, a great partner. The way you treat your people at work, if they're your colleagues or your staff, make their life better and feel they can start and you make their life feel better, they're going to be more productive, you're going to make more money. This by product of that. But you'll find that they go out and talk to other people. You go to the supermarket and all of a sudden other checkout people are all smiling and everything else. Your day's enriched because everything goes. What goes around comes around.

That's the way it works.