I’ve been asking questions like these since 1966.

That was my freshman year at college. We still wore freshman beanies then, which made me particularly conspicuous when I walked into an American history class filled with sophomores.

I was there because a sophomore living next door had told me not to wait. “You have to take history with this guy. We don’t know how long he’ll be here.”

“This guy” was David McKeith, now Professor Emeritus of History at Ithaca College.

His classes were different. One former student remembers McKeith beginning a lecture by asking his students to imagine themselves walking down a cobblestone street in Boston 250 years earlier. “This was history coming alive,” he wrote.

But what stayed with me went deeper than making history come alive.

He taught me to look beneath what happened. What assumptions were operating? What circumstances helped produce the event? What was happening underneath what we could see?

I applied that way of looking at the world to my own life.

Three times, that learning extended to others.

Listening, Learning, and Looking Beneath

In 1987, I bought a dating service.

Compatibles was a personal introduction service. People responded to an advertisement, talked with me personally, and came in for a consultation.

The first thing I noticed appeared before they ever walked through the door.

It was how difficult it could be to make the phone call.

Underneath that hesitation was often an unspoken message: "If I haven’t been able to meet someone on my own, maybe there is something wrong with me."

I didn’t have a name for what I was seeing. I didn’t have a theory I was trying to prove.

There was no internet to search.

I had people.

For years, I listened to what people shared with me. Over time, patterns emerged: assumptions people didn’t recognize as assumptions, beliefs affecting choices, old experiences influencing new relationships, and patterns producing results people desperately wanted to change.

Eventually, I wrote a book for my clients, Finding the One. It grew out of those years of observation.

The language of the conscious and subconscious mind came later. As information became increasingly available through the internet, it gave me a framework for understanding and researching processes I had already spent years observing.

Beliefs and Politics

In 2008, during the Democratic presidential primary, that same way of seeing entered another part of my life: politics.

Former President Bill Clinton had called part of the argument 

surrounding Obama’s record on the Iraq War “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” It was reported at the time that some leaders interpreted his words very differently from the meaning Clinton said he intended.

What caught my attention was how an interpretation could become a statement of fact about another person’s intent.

Clinton could truthfully say, "This is what I meant."

Another person could truthfully say, "This is what I believe you meant."

But "This is what you really meant" crosses a boundary.

It substitutes one person’s interpretation for another person’s internal thought and presents that interpretation as fact.

I started looking at politics through the same lens I had been using for years to understand individual behavior: looking beneath what was being said to the assumptions, interpretations, beliefs and patterns operating underneath it.

For years, those observations remained largely personal.

More recently, those observations became the foundation for the Change-a-Mind App and Explore Underground News.

The Change-a-Mind App looks beneath political messages to examine how familiar patterns can influence what people believe, the choices they make and, ultimately, political power.

Explore Underground News applies the same idea to current events:

Beyond the headline - Below ground - The hidden impact on all of us.

Conscious Mind Breakthrough

Almost sixty years after I first walked into David McKeith’s classroom, that way of looking beneath the surface became Conscious Mind Breakthrough.

It was created as a way of giving back what I had been given, in a form another person could actually use in their own life.

Most of us know that little voice.

We decide we want to do something differently, take a chance, make a change, try again.

And somewhere inside comes:

Remember what happened the last time we tried that?

That little voice is speaking from a pattern already formed by what happened before. Whether we follow it can affect the decision we make and the result that follows.

Conscious Mind Breakthrough is an interactive workshop that allows us to take an experience from our own life and work it through a process designed to help us see what might be operating beneath the surface.

The subjects may look very different from a dating service I bought in 1987 or a history classroom I walked into in 1966.

To me, they aren’t.

For sixty years, I have been asking essentially the same questions:

What is happening beneath what we can see? What does it mean? And what can we do with what we learn?

Those questions have shaped my life and continue to guide my work.

If you have a question about anything I’ve shared here, or would simply like to know more, you’re welcome to contact me at hello@winwiththis.com.