Alan talks about his background and experience in psychology, educational psychology, and corporate training, sharing his journey of how he discovered effective presentations from Werner Erhard and how he started teaching it at Digital Equipment Corporation and Symantec Corporation. Later, he started his own company, Alan Carroll and Associates, which is now called Mindfulness in Action, where he helps people become powerful professional speakers and teaches them the "secret sauce" that transforms their experience. The purpose of the podcast is to bring people with their own secret sauce and have them share it with the audience to help them transcend their ego state of consciousness and move to a transcendent state of consciousness called mindfulness.
About Alan:
Alan Carroll is an Educational Psychologist who specializes in Transpersonal Psychology. He founded Alan Carroll & Associates 30 years ago and before that, he was a Senior Sales Training Consultant for 10 years at Digital Equipment Corporation. He has dedicated his life in search of mindfulness tools that can be used by everyone (young and old) to transform their ability to speak at a professional level, as well as, to reduce the psychological suffering caused by the misidentification with our ego and reconnect to the vast transcendent dimension of consciousness that lies just on the other side of the thoughts we think and in between the words we speak.
Hi, everybody. This is part two of my introduction to the mindful you podcast. Part one, I shared with you a little of my background, how I hike how I came into the space of mindfulness. And what do I do in the world to create mindfulness experiences for other people. And I, through my own transformation, on the stage of public speaking, to share an experience there 1974 1975 California Street, San Francisco, Warner Earhart seminar trainings. And I was in the guest seminar leader program, where they were being trained to be able to speak in front of groups of people in order to enroll them into the the s training, which I found to be like one of the best, if not the best, foundational kinds of trainings that I've ever that I've ever experienced, and it's still alive. Here we are in 2023, and it's still alive. It's called landmark education Corporation now, but the work that we did at the s IX training is same work we're doing in landmark. So I encourage people, if you wanted to have a real good, grounding, clear, conscious experience about what's going on around here, and how to better navigate your own life through it. The landmark education Corporation, the forum would be I would highly, highly recommend that.
Alan Carroll:
And in the training for the guest seminar Leaders program, you have to you stand up and you share about your experiences and all these things. And, and I was shy. I use the word shy. Terrified is another word, but shy, we'll take we'll take a little bit for shy. And I remember there's about 100 200 people in the room. And Marcia Martin is in front of the audience, and she's saying, Okay, who would like to share? Now I knew that I'm looking around, I had not shared anything yet. And I'd been in the program for a couple of weeks and haven't raised my hand because I was terrified. Well terrified of what well terrified of, of looking like looking like a fool. You don't want to look like a fool. The ego doesn't want to look like a fool. ego wants to look like hey, I'm in charge kind of a guy. And I told myself before the weekend that you know, what am I going to share thinking about what I'm going to share, but I was going to share, to hear I was Saturday 1030 In the morning, Marsha said who wants to share? The my hangover? No, my hand did not go up. But the voices inside my head. They got pretty loud, pretty quick. One voice inside my head says What the heck are you said, you're gonna stand up? You said you're gonna raise your hand, get your hand in the air. The other voice said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, hold on here. Since it's Wait a second. No need to rush. And the other voice comment. I know. You get your hand in the air now. And then the other voice The other side said Well, yeah, yeah. I'll tell you what, tell you what to let me think about it. And if there's an opportunity after lunch, we'll do it again. And so these battling voices went back and forth back and forth inside my head until I had the realization that the only way out of the prison was to raise my hand and I did. And it changed my life. I raise my hand and Marsha immediately called my name, couldn't take my hand down now. Standing up, take the microphone, we had one of those popsicle microphones. And this is pretty much what my first chant in front of the audience my first talk in front of the audience, my first speaking, was something like this. Good morning, my name is on the call, I got to this point, this time I got a voice as I showed you that I got to watch it. I tried to avoid alcohol. I'm here today gang. And the applause was nothing that blew your socks off polite, polite blows. Marcia looked at me. And she looked at the audience and she smiled. Thank God, she smiled. And she said, that's what it looks like. When you when you break through, you don't come out of the egg, an eagle, you come out of the egg, an egg, let vulnerable, wet little feathers kind of person easily crushed that experience of annihilation kind of thing. Because that's what I was doing, I was annihilating myself that image inside my head.
