Hi Folks
For those that are unaware, my name is Ben Cardall and I am The Deductionist. What does that mean? Well it means that I can make up words to make my job seem cooler.
Secondly, this means that I have spent (at this point in my life) 18 years developing and training the Sherlockian mindset. This has led me to spend my days working as a mentalist and my nights teaching people around the world how to read people, scenarios and the clues they carry with them. I have been bought in as a consultant on a few actual police cases in my time and have had real world first hand experience at least once a day in what works for this technique, and what does not.
The Monographs was a book that I developed to help put these skills within reach of anyone and to help those same people to realise that there is no situation that this way of thinking can not be used to benefit you and those around you. The information you glean will give you a choice, and allow you to make an informed decision on how to approach every situation you encounter.
With that in mind, I am often asked how to start with this.
First of all, I am no expert. I am a Sherlockian by heart and by nature who has spent the better part of his life exploring the reality of these skills and how to learn them. I use deduction as part of my work as a mentalist and I utilise these skills to show my audiences that I can know more about them than I really should. My students, that they can too and the cases I assist with, that they can not escape this way of thinking.
This is one of the building blocks of this state. Creation of the right mindset makes you present in everything you do. There is nothing worse than passivity, be it temporary or otherwise and seeing someone else capitalise on the steps that you missed. It all starts in building a strong foundation through training and then taking the same methods to apply them to real life. To control that little voice inside your head that has a say in so much of what you say and do.
As a great man once wrote “The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning” and this is what we cultivate with this simple technique that can be tweaked in a variety of different ways to create new benefits. A stoic benefit and presence of mind.
If you were to obtain 2 small sources for audio, with 2 separate ear phones that are connected. In the right ear you play pan pipes, or whale song or rainforest noises. In the left ear you play something loud, Metallica is my personal weapon of choice. The aim of the game, little by little is to slowly increase the volume of the loud music and still enjoy listening to whatever pleasant sounds are in your right ear. Remember to change ears as you do this.
You are developing focus and control, that can be aimed at will. From here to take that same idea and make it attack more areas of your brain that feed into your emotional processing. Once the initial training becomes easy, swap out Metallica for your all time favourite band, or a sound track to a film that really makes you weep or stirs the most powerful nostalgia within you. You will still be following along with the relaxing music. This strengthens our resistance to certain cognitive biases as we learn to build a strong control of how we look at situations, focusing on reading actually what you see because you can tune out whatever you wish.
Imagine sitting in a coffee shop and being able to see and hear everything from two tables away. You can tune out all that ‘noise’ to focus on the important elements. This is highly important when reading situations if you need to take mental note of blink rate, skin temperature, foot positioning, language patterns, micro expressions and baseline reactions to certain elements because you have to track all of this and still be present enough to maintain conversation and focus on whatever business is at hand. A must!
The final phase of this is to swap out the relaxing music for an audiobook and the aim here is to follow the audiobook whilst having your Limbic system assaulted. I recommend a chapter per ear. With this final element what you develop as a result of this is a sponge like retention for details. Going back to the coffee shop example, you can then also get the words that are being said, as well as everything else. A salient point to take away from this is to make sure to change ears. You don’t want to be more prone to focusing on one side of your body than the other and make sure you do this with eyes open as when learning to focus at will, you don’t want to learn this mindset by closing your eyes. You would need to build this into your natural state.
What you get from this is an unshakeable calm, without conscious effort. To tackle any task with a focused and clear mind. Productivity increases, as does retention in what you do and what you see because you are, without much effort from your thought, present in every moment you are awake.
Now to go back to the people reading example of all the elements to keep track of, what we get as a result of this training is an ability to quieten the mind enough to not only deal with, but to compute all of these elements and not have them over whelm you. Now you combine this mindset with simple memory techniques and you have the foundations of never missing a step again and recalling what you would like, at will.
This is one of many techniques included in The Monographs that you can use to strengthen your mind and sharpen your thoughts in approaching logic puzzles of any nature. Whether it is crime solving, people reading or anything in between.
To explore what life would be like through the eyes of Sherlock Holmes, get yours here. MX Publishing Link to get your own copy!
Keep me posted on how you are getting on with your cases!
If I can be of assistance then do let me know. Keep your eyes peeled for more musings
