Please welcome again the miraculous the one and only Chris Parsa Muchas gracias Reina. Thank you everyone So I have the honor and privilege of introducing our speaker for the morning we go way back we met about 30 minutes ago It's been a lovely journey this relationship So with that I have written some thoughts Our speaker today is Robert point and Rob's work in essence has been a lifelong improvisation He left London to work in Madrid only to then move to Argentina where he worked virtually For a company in Scotland and know that wasn't 2022 that was in 1994 There was a chance meeting with Gary Hirsch who some of you may know which led to an improv base Consultancy consultancy called on your feet based out of Portland, Oregon And that is still thriving today Another unplanned twist led to 20 years of work at Oxford University Said business school where he is an associate fellow in essence Rob designs and facilitates learning experiences his improv journey began in 1997 which has been really about studying improvisation without the games all of which has been grounded in the belief of playing around with things and people Rather than trying to control things and people You may know him from one of his three books everything's an offer where we find let go notice more and use everything do improvise which you now all should own a copy of and Do pause which is tangentially related to applied improvisation, but there are certainly connections to be made He lives here in Spain just 80 kilometers away from Avila So not very far from where we are in an off-the-grid house in arenas de San Pedro But even that itself is an emergent process without any further ado. I welcome and introduce Rob There's something we all have in common if you're here There was some point in your life Where you came across this thing called improv theater in some form or other in some place or other And there was something about the way you came across it or something about it that drew your attention enough to make you want to do something with it or do some more with it and I'd invite you through this morning session to just think about what your story of that has been and We've been talking this week and the title of this conference is about our story But I would suggest that we've each got an individual story, which is probably very different and very diverse and Very interesting So I'm gonna do to take some prompt you to think about that is I'm gonna tell you my story Chris alluded to some elements of it just now and I've titled this the accidental improviser because it kind of all happened as it would seem by accident and yet Are things just chance or are there things that we do that make them more likely and For me, there's something here about actually quite deeply the way the world works, which hopefully will kind of unfold as I go on It's early in the morning. It's the third day of the conference depending when you arrive. Maybe fourth You may have been up late last night So I'm gonna invite you to do something else which is to as you listen to this if your mind wanders in The spirit that Chris just mentioned don't try and control that don't try and be diligent and be a good Audience member and bring your attention back to me Actually, I invite you to explore the wandering and to notice Where your mind wanders off because it may be that your unconscious is working and there was something there that happened or that was Triggered by something I said that is of more interest and significance than what I'm about to go on to say So allow yourself that that luxury So the origin of this begins with a t-shirt not any old t-shirt And not a t-shirt like this But this actual t-shirt which I bought at the Burnside Market in Portland, Oregon on a cold wet November Saturday in 1996 now This is a Gary Hirsch t-shirt as many of you know occasionally I get recognized wearing it because people say that's a Gary Hirsch t-shirt Which is nice for Gary not so nice for me But it moved me to get in touch with Gary We met to talk about the design for a t-shirt I wanted to do a t-shirt for a client at this point. I wasn't doing improv at all But I had just given a speech at Nike's design camp Which was also a piece of improv because I was only invited to do that because the kind of cool important guy They had lined up to do the speech dropped out so I've done this speech and it was a horrible brief because it was it was Like being asked to give something with a substance of a university lecture and the humor value of a best man's speech All-in-one whilst being told that the Nike designers were the coolest audience on the planet and they were very hard to impress and oh, you'd better be funny And there's another little riff and there's like yeah last year's guy was from Harvard and he wore He talked about the grateful dead and made everybody cry whilst talking about his experiences in a concentration camp So a hard act to follow so I did the only sensible thing that you could do Which is take some things that I knew to be funny rather than try to be funny myself And that included some little bits of film some clips of whose lines are anyway So I'd been primed by that experience. That was what taking me to Portland That's where I was in the place where I could buy this t-shirt So then I meet Gary Hirsch to talk about him designing a t-shirt for our clients And I was in branding and communications at the time and so as we're just introducing Ourselves he says oh, yeah as well as the public art staff and the t-shirts I do this in Pro Theater and I think because it had been in my mind. I said to him God, how do you do that? And he said oh, it's easy. It's just practice Because when I said to him how do you do that? I was thinking this must require some special talent and you don't look very talented Which I can say because I say it all the time in front of Gary, so he doesn't mind And then he went on and he says it's just a matter of practice And as he talked more about what that practice was or how he understood it I recognized a lot of ideas that I'd been exploring quite separately in a completely different universe called complex adaptive science so the science of complexity if you like is the scientific of understanding that scientific understanding of how Messy things happen in the real world not idealized neat clean things in the lab and I tried that as a workshop technique to work with People from a company I formally worked for and it ended up with them saying to me why does this sound like a new religion? Now that didn't seem like very promising grounds. That was another part of my priming. And so when I said to Gary You know just offhand off the cuff So could you do a workshop with a whole bunch of ad agency folks because I've got this brief for a thing down in Tempe, Arizona it was to do some big leadership retreat with Leo Burnett it was and and he just went. Oh, yeah, sure, you know, I later discovered he was kind of going Ah, you know, but he said yes as improvisers do and Almost then and there we decided to work together and I was leaving Oregon the next day And so anyway, I won't go into the whole detail of the story But that that's how it all began and it's an extremely kind of unlikely story and it seems a bit random But you'll all be noticing as I'm talking the things that both Gary and I are doing in that which are already embodying improv practice So we meet to talk about one thing that we're willing to listen to each other to explore our interest To get curious about what the other one's doing and to let that agenda go and then to explore and to build and yes And on each other's interests and observations in order to then immediately move into a space of doing something together And pretty soon afterwards actually starting a business but all of that I was kind of unaware of at the time and And I was unfunded of saying you couldn't have planned it You couldn't have planned it and they saw it for me somebody asked me yesterday about my passions in my interest I think this for me isn't an absolute passion, which is the most interesting and powerful things in my life I couldn't possibly have planned I couldn't probably even have imagined them So you take me back to university aged 18 or 19 in some kind of career planning session I couldn't possibly have articulated what I now do because it didn't exist and so It seems to me that a kind of hallmark of the most important interesting stimulating Alive things in my life anyway is That they couldn't possibly have been planned the human brain and rational analysis is a powerful tool, but It's hasn't kind of hold a candle to the nature of a complex adaptive messy generative Interconnected, you know a live living system Which is of course what we all are individually and what we we all inhabit so that was kind of how it began and Extremely unlikely and if I told you the story in full you'd think it was implausible and I was really just kind of making out or losing the plot Then if I fast forward a few years About a week after 9 11 So this time I'm already working with improv and working with mostly agencies and creative applications of improv And I got a phone call from a friend of mine In a big corporate in the UK and here's what I hear him say in that call I hear him say the world has changed Cast your mind back we're all old enough to remember that we remember where you were when you those events unfolded If you think of the week after we now don't know how the world is going to be This is what I heard him say the world is now going to be different. We don't know what's going on I want to bring together a diverse group of people to explore that that sounds like a good idea I thought you said I can't pay you but I'll pay you to come over from Spain And I'll put you up in a hotel and there'll be lots of other interesting people So that's what I'd understood and I arrived to find a boardroom table full of people in suits Looking very proper and very suited and booted and I'm dressed not unlike how I'm dressed now So I'm obviously already labeled as the clown by implication And I only got my first experience clowning yesterday with Jessica So I wouldn't feel particularly well prepared and this scene unfolds But she's probably all been in where somebody starts to do an introduction We kind of had it here actually and it goes through a series of introductions And what quite often happens is the first person says something about their job Something about their academic qualifications perhaps The next person says both of those and then add something about their family and then something about their extra Curricular interest and so by the time you get to the end it's taking three or four minutes for each person to introduce himself I'm sort of quietly dying going. Oh, this is horrible. This is not what I thought And it gets to me and I say I'm second to last there's 26 people there and I'm second to last I'm sitting there looking like a prune and So I say is anybody seeing who's lines are anyway, and they were kind of slightly puzzled go. Yes, I Said well, I do that with business people At which point the most senior person in the room who I think was also getting bored with proceedings Said that sounds much more interesting than what Nick's got us here to do Can we do that and I'm dying at this point because although on the one hand that sounds attractive in those circumstances I promise you I didn't want to stand up and do an impromptu workshop So I said desperate to get off stage as it were so it passed to the last person next to me Guy called Keith Ruddle. He at that time was from Templeton College, Oxford and before he introduced himself. He said I work in Oxford and actually we do some of that improv stuff as it turns out with Neil Malachi Who some of you may know or have come across And so later in the night in the evening at night I followed up with him in the bar and that led to a series of introductions Where I started working in executive education at Oxford University So it's not academic stuff and I effectively began doing an icebreaker session for a leadership program And that was 20 years ago and I stopped doing it about six months ago and What happened there was extraordinary for me was because what started off as something in a kind of fairly Necessary but fairly perfunctory fairly functional space, which is to bring people who are nervous At the beginning of a program or course together So this program is an open program since people from all over the world and people from different walks of life So it started kind of as an icebreaker or warm-up Which the academics called learning readiness by the way So if you want to sort of big up warm up you can talk about creating learning readiness that makes it sound grander But it began as that and over time as I kind of got over my imposter syndrome and learned something about leadership I realized this sort of took me back in in my own story back to that Accusation of it being like a new religion that actually in the world of leadership and executive development lo and behold What are they dealing with? complex uncertain Unpredictable uncontrollable interconnected changing circumstances and people there is no executive in the world Who can claim unless they're insane, which by way many of them are and Or if they're not their organizations are you know that most business organizations these days technically qualify as being psychotic According to the diagnostic and statistical manual of the American psychiatric associations, which is worth thinking about for a moment It's quite a serious point, but anyway There's none of them in the world that if they've got half a brain cell awake will Not acknowledge that there are many many things that are beyond their control And so in order to engage them in a conversation all you have to be able to say is to say well So what do you do when things can't you can't control things? Do you just work harder to try and control them? Do you just gather more data run faster put in more hours? Or do you do something else and here's something else that you can do So over the last 20 years that piece of work which started as a warm-up has morphed into a session on Navigating complex adaptive systems And I've been lucky enough to work alongside lots of the eminent thinkers in this field who bring the scientific Understanding this is kind of piece of re-incorporation From my own interest way back when to sit alongside the playful light intelligible Simple straightforward common day every day way of working that Inforizational theater in its language and its tools brings now Sometimes during that period We were busy building a house The house is kind of over there about 80 kilometers as Chris said and this is it and it's a house built in stone and Despite my enthusiasm for this emergent flexible adaptive way of working at this point I assumed That that that body of work would have nothing to do with the building of the house building the house a Solid project literally a piece of structure built in this case out of stone With legal requirements with building regulations with all sorts of constraints and controls and It wasn't natural even to me to think of improvising in that context But what's interesting and this is you know, I worked on it quite closely in a very Rudimentary way. I'm not a skilled craftsman at all, but I would help out with the builders So I would spend time and pay attention to what was actually going on and what I started to to realize and understand later was that Even or perhaps especially in a concrete project of building a piece of structure You need the capacity to creatively adapt or the project will flounder There will be materials That you can't get or that are wrong Errors will be made Opportunities exist that you might not have been able to see when you were drawing the plans and As this project went on it took about two years Realized that two things were happening. One is we were using What I call in this context creative adaptation, but is essentially improvisation To solve problems so for example and the winter we were building most of the house It rained incessantly which seems strange given the weather now But it does do that here occasionally and you can't work with stone in the wet It's really dangerous up scaffolding and so the builders started to dig initially the trenches for the services for the pipes and for the Cables that needed to go under the house, but it kept raining so they kept digging it rained more so they dug more and before you knew it we had a cellar which wasn't on the plans and What was interesting here was the reason they did that wasn't just kind of It wasn't just filling the time so they could collect their wage slip It was because we had built a relationship with those people of confidence and trust that they felt that we were part of their team And they were part of our team and they knew local knowledge that this house had been designed by somebody from the city My brother-in-law why because it didn't have a cellar and if you live in the countryside Especially off-grid. Where are you going to put the compressor or the chainsaw or the three mountain bikes or the summer stuff Or the things for the pool you've got to have some extra space So they weren't just doing it willfully they were doing it they were doing it intentionally But beyond and outside of the plan in the context of a relationship that had trust and confidence So that's the kind of on the you know opportunity side Sometimes opportunities would emerge out of problems So there's one day when Basilio and was up the scaffolding was on the top of a stone wall and stone wall's 57 centimeters thick as And so he was worried that when we had the when put this little roof over the top a little piece of roof that water Was going to get in if it came diagonally in and that was going to weaken the wall So he he suggested that we extend the roof and basically through a series of steps We ended up building a whole shaded porch, which also wasn't on the plans And so what I began to realize that even in this sort of very structured process This ability to improvise to flex to respond to adapt Was solving problems on the one hand and creating new opportunities on the other And I talked to my brother in law a lot about this about the limitations of computer aided design in architecture Which is very abstract where the hand is? Absent the mind is present. So it's this embodied nature of doing the actual work. There's one beautiful moment Never forget this one turning up on the house on the building site from Madrid with my brother-in-law and the builder suddenly perking up And go I'm glad you've come today And slightly defensively call my brother-in-law says, why's that then he says well because the way that you've sketched out this roof The body of the the body of the body of that part of the house is not a rectangle. It's a rhombus I'll spare you the details, but anyway, he's basically he said the roof is not going to meet the walls Bit of a problem maybe You see and that's what happens with the mind and with the computer you can miss that But if you're the hand and you're going roof beam here brick there excuse me so Jose Luis had a solution and he said so you can do one of three things you could incline the roof beam You could change the pitch of the roof or you could make the walls pinch And I suggest we do a collection of the first two or immediate one. Yeah, that's great Fantastic, you know and I'm reading a book at the moment actually that embodied intelligence That is a great example of it that there's so much more intelligence in the embodiment than we realize There's a lovely quote from Richard Rauti who says if the body had been more simple nobody would have thought we had a mind So that's brilliant So on my journey through this world of improvisation what I'm finding here is oh look even where I didn't expect to find it as an Enthusiast as a practitioner, you know steeped now in working in corporates in working in the university and working with leaders Working with corporate teams working with all sorts of groups of people Seeing that it's always there and it led me to this conclusion as you can't do anything only with improvisation If we just improvise this conference, we wouldn't be here You know all the work that that's been done to get a group of us here in this place with all the things We need that needs to be planned So you you can't organize anything or build anything only with improvisation, but you can't build or organize anything Without it without an element of it. There is no plan in the world that is comprehensive enough to anticipate Everything that could happen and that's framed in a kind of negative way Whereas I like to think of it in a positive way that the world is so much more rich There's so much more abundance that you know plans are a great start point and they get you going But actually doing the simple things that improv encourages us to do pay attention notice use what you've got is Absolutely vital and much simpler and easier and a lighter gentler way of being So is this work progress progress is I'm getting a bit closer now because this photograph was taken six kilometers away So my wife's family have a property where she farms literally down the road where I've been staying and When I was a university student, I used to go on reading weekends and I thought it would be a good idea to catch up on my reading again after all this time So I started to organize reading weekends reading retreats, but kind of with a twist So this very different from a book club so It was the idea of reading different things and kind of cross-verbalizing ideas And actually as I was developing this idea for the first time I'd invited a group of people to come to this amazing place And they weren't paying very much attention and I still hadn't worked out how I was going to choose the books And so I thought okay Give the work back to the people So give the work back back to the people which is a very kind of improv It's very sympathetic to the improv way of thinking actually comes from the work of Ronald Huyvitz at Harvard in adaptive leadership So he talks about not trying to solve the problem as a leader but give the work back to the people They're the people the best place to do it So in this case what I did was asked people to suggest books and that had two effects One was it saved me the labor of having to choose the books and secondly It got them interested and paying attention and sharing the responsibility So if when they turned up there were no books at least they'd feel partially responsible And as a byproduct it meant you got a list of books that by definition No one individual would have chosen so fabulous diversity and contrast without any effort So the way that the reading weekend is done unfolded The first one I did I thought well these will all be interesting people and what happens if on the first morning Over breakfast they just get into a conversation and they don't want to read what do I do then got this issue of control again How do I control them? How do I make them do what I want to do is the sort of the mad woman in the head that Eduardo gave us yesterday for which many things not heard that before and So what I decided to do was Was we put all the books out on a table and The thing I'd not noticed was that people came with great hunger to read and also I'd set up these two rules So one was you can only have one book at any one time You can have it for a shorter time as you want or as long a time But if you take it for five minutes to skip through it decide you don't like it needs to go back on the table And the other rule was the more interesting one was a simple piece of kind of you know guidance which was Read between meals talk over meals So we have this tradition here in Spain of last over a message a long conversations over meals And and that was kind of what gave me that idea and of course I needn't have bothered because it's I needn't have worried about whether people would read or not partly because people had come To a reading weekend. They were desperate to read the idea of being left alone in company with a book was heavenly for many of these people but also as Soon as I'd set that up read between meals talk over meals You can imagine what started to happen people started to think all these other people are smart.  I shouldn't really be here But all these other people are smart and he said we're gonna have to say something over lunch So I'd better have something to say so I'd better go read so Only after I've been doing this for a number of iterations. Did I realize this is improv? This is a 72 hour experience organized with no controlling structures With a container that's held with a few prompts and inputs and invitations to people because the conversations over the lunch are truly improvised and Free-flowing and open and not necessarily about the books in fact the whole weekend is not about the books at all The books are just a star point just a first offer And there are a lot of other events that I've designed that I've realized only belatedly Improved without the games So kind of takes me to where I am now. So when the pandemic began I was in Oxford actually and ended up kind of locked down there and Like probably many of you here I had a huge aversion to working online I had no interest in it. I was deeply skeptical of it. I thought it couldn't possibly be my thing I just had a visceral reaction. I did not want to go that And what I saw was my Not quite employer, but my Alma Mater if you like the Said Business School at Oxford University, which is literally a mile away from where I was sticking out videos of talking heads What's called chalk and talk in the trade? Clever people offering expertise and I just thought this was rubbish. I thought this was really stupid That was the last thing that we needed and I'd be skeptical of its value in the General way of things but in the pandemic. I thought it was just awful.  I kind of went okay smart ass What would you do then and There were a couple of clues So one was I'd put a few little videos as you know We're all experimenting with online at this point up on LinkedIn of just talking about some of the practices that I write about in Everything's an offer and do improvise and they've got quite a lot of traction by my standards. I'm a very Amateur social media person and so I thought it's interesting and it reminded me of how in those sessions at Oxford's after You know, I must have done hundreds of them Always working on them always improving them. They're never the same But you know, I had a body of experience and I'd realized that actually the kind of set of ideas that I had to offer to somebody Could be kind of transmitted in about 20 minutes. And so what if I did that online? What if I took the 20 minutes of my take on this body of work and the simple set of practices? And so that became this thing called the everyday improviser Going away from kind of corporate applications and thinking more about improv in everyday life and of course everybody is improvising nobody has a script for their life and Just putting it into a playful gentle kind of format borrowing actually follow enough another very Improving to do borrowing from a completely different world during a lockdown like many of us I'd been entertaining myself with various physical activities and I'd taken up a thing that I ended up calling torture yoga More probably called Lucas Rockwood's 21 Popening yoga, which I would highly recommend But he had he he was somebody who seemed very well versed in this format So I borrowed the idea in the way that Gary and I because we do this together Gary Hirsch and I run the everyday improviser is 20 minutes a day for a week Spare her through a working week An introduction a practice a day and then a conclusion so five sessions and then an optional Q&A and all of its video And you can if you pay to come which is not very expensive. You can watch it at any time So if you like what I was doing there was a kind of taking everything I've learned How can I make it super simple and super accessible and then the other was more of a response to the side business school thing and The programs I've been involved with have been designed very skillfully and used many artistic and creative Methodologies including in product but not limited to it But they still have the semblance of structure What one of my colleagues there calls the fig leaf of the program? And cause fig leafs traditionally in paintings protect your important part So, you know, maybe the fig leafs important, but but what the other thing I started to explore is what would happen What would what do people really need and what would happen if you allowed a program a learning? Endeavour to be truly emergent What if you had no curriculum? What if all you paid attention to was the container and you thought carefully about the stimulus that you put into it So that has become the thing that I'm now mostly occupied with which is called yellow And we're about two and a half years in now And what we do is we bring together tiny tiny groups my partner Alex caribis and Berlin and I we do all of this online Initially, and we add events to it But what we do is we put together small groups of six people which are facilitated by us and there's two levels of improvisation going on So on the macro level, there is no curriculum We have no idea where each individual group is going to end up they meet for two hours once a fortnight over six months So very slow very long and we still have no idea where we're going at that macro level It's very very inefficient because it means that every single session is designed specifically for that group But since what I like is designed that's great for me And we've run over 153 Different individually designed sessions. So that's what's going on in the big art and Interestingly more and more people still a significant minority tiny minority probably come to us wanting that They've got their structured learning elsewhere They want a place as one of them described it a counter space To be able to learn what it is they need to learn or to be able to uncover. What is their question? And as an aside, we've learned along the way an awful lot about what you can do on zoom So in those sessions we do bodywork. We've done dance. We've done tons of improv We've made constellations on the tabletop. We've eaten things We've you know, we there's a lot more that you can do at the level of scale Tiny level of scale with what I call a non-porous boundary So when you know who's in the room and you get to know and trust those people and establish psychological safety There's an awful lot you can do. So that's the kind of the macro Improvisation in yellow, but the micro improvisation is with each session. Yes, we have a start point So we know to give you an example a question that arisen in one session, which is what brings me alive and We thought that's a really interesting question It's a question that actually in yellow keeps coming back, which is also interesting So what brings me alive? And so we invited a regenerative olive oil farmer who I'd met a conference guy called Will Rolf Who runs a beautiful olive oil business called to Phil Zach Ross with his brother And we invited him to come and talk about their practice of regenerative agriculture How do you keep an olive tree alive? And what does it mean to to? To create a fertile system in all of its facets social as well as ecological organic and We use that as stimulus to talk with them about that question what brings you alive But we didn't have an hours lecture on olive farming. We had maybe will talking for 10 or 15 minutes telling a few stories But the micro improvisation is we might do something like that or we might start with a question and not Know where it's going to go at all or completely abandon The plan such as we had had all together so in the chit chat and the arrival It might become apparent that something is really going on for somebody. So on one occasion One of the people in the group who was a banker It turned out that while we were meeting people were being fired. He knew he wasn't going to be fired But that was going on in the background of his organization. So that Session game about that. So we let go of the agenda. We attended to the emotional room and It might seem that we were perhaps Kind of pandering to that one guy but but not really because that was there and that was real and it was alive for everybody So that can happen or sometimes a marginal comment early on might send us off on a tangent altogether So just to end off then where this kind of brings me to is for me improv has always been this it's not the answer It's not even an answer, but I'm not interested in answers. Anyway, it's always seemed to me like an incredibly light playful simple intelligible legible language for understanding something really important about the way life is and I don't just mean Human life. I don't mean life in organizations. I mean life the big stuff organic life everywhere of which we are just an example so for me that that's kind of been its delight and it continues to kind of yield understanding and insight for me and Recently I've come across the work of Margaret Heffernan who used to work at the BBC She's now a professor of practice at Bath University in the UK and has written a lot about kind of uncertainty and complexity And she has this lovely lovely idea, which is kind of enthralling me at the moment So she says, you know, maybe you can do this for you now Imagine I could give you the script of your life Imagine I could tell you what the experience that you're gonna have for the rest of today will be and tomorrow and the next day I can tell you what you're gonna have look for lunch six years on Tuesday I can tell you when you're gonna die who you're gonna meet I can lay all that out in front of you How attractive is that? Not is it not attractive? I would argue that's not living Margaret says that's turns life into a process of waiting for the train And I think when I started with improv what I did was I presented it in the corporate world as a kind of You know this terribly awkward or complex changing thing that you can't like this improv stuff will help you with that And implicit in the promise I was making unconscious was a kind of I can get you to the promised land Via this improv stuff. I can get you to a place of certainty and understanding and security And I think now I don't think like that I wasn't trying to think like that by then but I back then but I think it may have come across like that What Margaret says now is that uncertainty gets a bad press But if you think about it much as most of us will say we don't like uncertainty Politicians will certainly say that business people will say that uncertainty the not knowing is Where almost everything we care about lives It's where we have agency. It's where who we are and what we do makes a difference It's where our creativity lives or comes from or ends up. It's How we create and craft our own identities So for me the shift over these last 25 years has been really from if you like a coping With uncertainty and complexity to almost a celebration of it And the ideas and experiences I've gleaned from improvisation along the way and I continue to use a kind of what have guided me and supported me Scaffolding the scaffolding that's kind of brought me through that journey And I grew up next to Salisbury Cathedral and when I was a schoolboy looking up at the cathedral, which is 135 meters high. I often used to think I wonder what kind of scaffolding they had So I'll stop there. Thanks very much for your attention


Okay, welcome back. We were looking at mental health is a particular issue that we wanted to look at for in particular areas of counseling, we are looking at mental health. We just did a bit of a brief introduction and I'd just like to go into a few more details about what is mental health, what are symptoms we need to be aware of the general kind of disorders that you see. And as people who are going to be in ministry, people who are going to be helping others, we need to also have some kind of an awareness of what mental health is and what is it that we can do. So as the World Health Organization has reported, the definition that they bring about is that mental health is a state of well-being in which the individual realizes what their own abilities, they're able to cope with different stressors that come in their life. They're able to be fruitful, they're able to be productive and also in turn contribute back to their community. Moving ahead to also look at certain facts about mental disorders is to know that these are basically statistics for us to see is that it can affect anyone, the men, the women, children, rich, poor. It's common. In fact, the statistics do show that at least one in four people in the population in general can have a diagnosable mental health issues and yes, one in five adults. The fact is that you may not really know that someone has a mental health disorder. They don't look very different from others. There may be only certain conditions that you are able to make out that there can be a mental health issue. It can range when you're looking at mental disorders, it can range from something that's very common to something that's extremely severe or something that's very mild to something that's really severe. And mental health disorders, it's not just about people feeling that they are stressed. It's a little bit more than that their inability to cope with regular day-to-day functioning, the fact that there are issues in their relationships. You will find that there are conditions in their physical well-being or physical functioning that is being affected. Mental health conditions or disorders can range from it being brief to it being long-term. It can affect different areas of life. It can affect people's work. It can affect people's relationships. It can affect the way that they see the world and see life in itself. Mental disorders can cause stress on the entire family, on a community at large also. But the fact is that there are effective forms of treatment when there are mental illness. So when we're looking at how do you label or understand what a mentally healthy person can do. A mentally healthy person can think clearly. They're able to build very strong relationships. They're able to cope with whatever stresses that there are in life, different challenges that come in life. They're able to cope with it and they are able to contribute and work in a community that they live in. This is how you would understand that a person has a stable mental health. When you're looking at mental wellness, there are nine signs of good mental health.  It affects your ability to cope with stress, overcome challenges. It affects the ability to build relationships. It also affects the ability to recover from certain setbacks and hardships. So strong mental health is not just the absence of mental health problems. Being mentally or emotionally healthy is much more than just being free of depression or fear, free of anxiety or any other psychological issues. It refers to the presence of certain positive characteristics. Like there can be a sense of contentment, a zest for living and the ability to laugh and have fun. The ability to deal with stress, bounce back from adversity. A sense of meaning and purpose to learn new skills to adapt to change. Having a balance between different things, between work and play, rest and activity. The ability to maintain good relationships. The place where one can be confident and have a sense of hope and optimism. The ability to let go of painful issues to be grateful, to have a sense of humor. So there are many of these things that you would see that helps in a person's mental health issues. So what is mental health? It's when there is a negative impact on the way somebody thinks, on the way somebody feels and the way they behave. So these are the three major components to it. How a person thinks, how a person feels and how a person behaves. So if you were to look at certain signs, how do you recognize certain signs? What are the symptoms of mental illness? There can be illogical thinking. They are not able to process their thoughts in a way that is helpful. That's what we say when it comes to thinking. There could be problems in thinking or having clarity in the way that someone thinks. And as a result, it can affect their behavior. You will see a decline in their functioning, either at work or office or school. There will be a decline in it. And a lot of them come under the emotional patterns. There's nervousness or there's high anxiety. There is different shifts of mood, huge forms of mood swings. There is apathy or a loss of motivation, a loss of trying, being extremely sensitive. And this affects the behavior where there is changes in the patterns of sleep. There's withdrawal from people. There's withdrawal from the responsibilities. There's withdrawal from even personal interests that they have. And you would notice that there is a decline in the functioning. So these are some of the symptoms that you would recognize. What are some of the warning signs? And this I think is important for us to know to understand when does someone actually really require help. So like it says here, it's not very straightforward and because you can't test it like the way that you can test a blood sugar or a heart condition.  So some of them are defined here but not all, but at least this gives you a good idea. So some of the warning signs are if there are reports of someone feeling sad, withdrawn for more than two weeks straight, then that's when you know that they need help. So there are times we all feel sad. We all feel withdrawn depending on some circumstances. It may go on for a period of time, maybe a day or two or three, but then you're able to bounce back into normalcy. But if there is a significant sense of sadness and feeling withdrawn, then there are certain signs of mental health issues. The fact that someone may try to harm or end their lives or even making plans. They're planning to end their lives or attempt a suicide. That's when there again, it's a warning sign or someone who has out of control risk taking behavior that causes themselves harm or self to others. Like those who may be in uncontrollable abusive substance abuse where they are not able to really discern whether that kind of a behavior is being helpful or not. Or there can be fear that is sudden fear over no reason. And there is absolutely no cause that they are able to save or which can be clubbed with some physiological responses like palpitations of the heart, discomfort or a difficulty breathing. When there's significant weight loss or gain, that's again another warning sign. Or they're able to see here or things, believe things that aren't real. And this is what we call is hallucinations where they feel people are talking to them or talking about them. Now, this can also be a sign of mental illness. Sometimes we shouldn't confuse this with evil spirits that people are engaging with evil spirits. So we've got to be careful and discerning in understanding what is being demon-possessed and what is it that is mental health or mental issues. Excessive use of alcohol or drugs is another warning sign. Changes in the mood, changes in behavior, significant changes in mood behavior, even in the personality is again another sign. Or extreme difficulty concentrating, not able to put attention to the tasks that are given or even bodies of fears that get in the way of daily activities. So these are certain, again, signs that we need to be careful about. Now, I've just listed, taken a snapshot of a picture that lists different kinds of mental health disorders. I'm not going to go into any of this. But if you're interested, I would suggest you do some reading to really understand this. Now, among the major mental health disorders in this category over here is what we would look at as mood disorders. Mood disorders are what you would say there are people who go through episodes of maybe having extreme high mood or extreme low mood. And that's what mood disorders are a major mental health disorder, psychotic disorders. The things that you see below that are disorders where they are outside of reality. They are not in reality and they perceive things that are very, very unreal. That again is again a major mental health disorder. Neurocognitive disorders is more organic in the result, which means there are some neurological disturbances that causes these kinds of disorders. And usually neurocognitive disorders definitely require medical help or medical interventions. The other addictions, addiction or disorders also can become major when someone is addicted to a substance. It can actually cause psychotic disorders or it can actually cause mood disorders in itself. There are other disorders. What is called as minor mental health disorders and all of the others form under that category. That's post-traumatic stress disorder after a certain trauma like maybe a catastrophe or a natural disaster or war or a personal difficult traumatic event. They're having a certain stress disorder that can come as a result of the stress. Anxiety disorders, having a sense of generalized anxiety, anticipatory fear over everything. Somatic disorders. Somatic disorders are things that they continue to feel that there is something significantly wrong in their health. And there are symptoms that they may bring about explanation to saying that it could be a serious physical issue. Personality disorders. Personality disorders are the way that people's personality are at a problem because they find it difficult to associate with different things in life and different relationships. Usually personality disorders come up largely in the midst of a relationship that people have personality disorders. Obsessive compulsive disorders is the obsessions of certain repetitive thoughts. Obsessive thoughts that continue to keep coming that causes distress, making them compulsively act on a certain behavior. That's again what we look at in minor mental health. Then dissociative disorders is where it isn't a representation of what is wrong but because of psychological disturbances that are there, there are certain conditions that act out. Then there are eating disorders and eating disorders where a lot of the disorders relate with food and their relationship with food. So these are some of mental health disorders and if you are interested more, it would be nice to just read these up to understand at least a few symptoms of how you can recognize some of this. Now when we look at mental health conditions, remember, let's not always look at either the person is mentally stable or the person is mentally ill. We see it in a continuum. So there are different stages. So initially there may be very mild symptoms and later the greatest stage is someone who has symptoms that are persistent and very severe that it affects their life. The idea of getting help is to ensure that they come down that continuum into a more stable head. So even a person with some symptoms of maybe low mood or symptoms of mild sadness, even though they are at a decided spectrum, that doesn't mean they don't need help. They also do require help so that it doesn't move up that continuum. It's to ensure that they get back into a more stable, more functional state. Something that we need to do is how can we reduce the stigma that's attached to mental health. The first and foremost thing is to be able to educate ourselves about what mental health is and especially because we are also in a place of ministry to also be very sensitive and careful about how we approach and how we help others with mental health issues. So educating yourself builds up a greater understanding of it. It is to show love and compassion to those who are mentally ill and not to stigmatize them, not to keep them away because of fear of how to respond. It's good to talk openly about mental health and that's something we must do because it's so much intricate into our well-being. Not to stereotype people with mental illness, to be respectful when you're talking about mental health and being able to role model. So how do we support people with mental health? And for all of us who are a part of ministry, it's important to understand how do we do that. So one of the things that we do is like we said, it's important to get educated to learn about the illnesses. It's also one is to be able to face your own fear and that sometimes to understand what do we think about mental illness? Do we feel afraid? Do we feel that there is a sense of unpredictability that's there? Is it demonic? So to really understand for ourselves what is it that we're fearing and bring it up to those fears to God and ask God to actually minister and help you to see this in a better light. To be able to also see that these kinds of mental health problems is something that is seen in the world around. And also to know that as believers and Christians we are not exempt from that. And to be sensitive about the fact of how we see mental health, we help those with mental illness. Also to be able to accept love those who are mentally ill to ensure that you see them as people, to see them as people who may need your help. We need your understanding. What else can we do? The other things of course is to be able to encourage them to get support and help that they need. Ensuring that even as we're praying for them, deliverance, praying for healing, all of them always encourage that they get any kind of help. If there is a possibility going with them for an appointment, making that first step of showing that you care and helping them speak with someone who's a mental health professional and also to be able to access other kind of services that are there. Apart from that, it's also to see how maybe as a person who's a minister, maybe there are certain limitations on your part because you don't know how to, what to expect, what to do. And that's perfectly okay. It doesn't mean you need to know everything. It's just being alongside with them, empathizing with them, being patient with them, working alongside with them is all that is required. And when we're not able to manage something, getting the help of a mental health professional to work with them is good. Getting family to help the person or, you know, sitting people in families to ensure that they can best help and not be in a place of judgment or a place of criticism while someone is going through that. And continue to support and stick with them even as they are receiving this kind of help. Because very often we do see, especially I think among our Christian community, I've noticed that people find it hard to seek help, even to talk to somebody about mental health issues. There is a fear that, you know, whether they would be seen as someone who doesn't have enough faith or don't believe in the goodness of God. But then as those of us who are in a place of ministry to be able to be patient and kind to them, even as they are going through the process of getting help, getting support, getting prayer, working alongside. It's important to just stick with them and see that they are supported and their help. I think another thing is also connecting them in the most sensitive and confidential way to other people who may be going through the same kind of issues so that there itself they can, you know, mobilize support and strength for one another. Okay. All right. Is there any question over here? Any thoughts, any questions before I move to the next part which is marriage and family? And this is some, we've reached some observations and what we could do. Any questions that I could bring up? No questions? Just a question.  Just maybe two, three minutes of just hearing from you as a learning experience for others. I'm sure all of you all would have met with someone who's had some of these conditions we spoke about today. So any thoughts? How did you deal with it? What have been your reflections? What did you do? I think bipolar disorder, people who are affected with bipolar disorder, when they speak, we would just maybe patiently listen to them for a long time. That is one of our experience. And I show them that we would be available in case if they want to talk at any point of time and also raise them to continue taking the medications if they are taking and pray with them. That's what the face we are in right now. Good. Yeah. That's a great place to be. Just supporting, helping, being with them, patient. That's wonderful. Good. All right. So I'll move on to the next one, which is another area of issues that we do see common issues that we see in counselling as marriage and family. Okay. I know you'll have a course in marriage and family and there's an entire, you know, a lot of chapters that we discuss over there. Here we're just looking at common issues that generally would come in families and couples. And as a counsellor, what are some of the things that you need to deal with? So certain issues that you would often find being presented to you is, and if you're, if you opened, I'm at page 43. I don't have a slide for the slides for these because they're very brief and as it's written here, it's basically to know that because people are different, the people in the marriage are different couples, personalities are different, there are bound to be conflicts, there's bound to be differences in the way that they communicate. There are going to be differences in the way they deal with their personal finances, the way that they deal with how they respond to crisis and stresses. And how they work together as a team. So you may see couples coming to you for help and communication in order to be able to support one another in different responsibilities of life. People may come with conflicts over money, conflicts over parenting, conflicts over infidelity, maybe adultery in the relationship and coming as a result of that. Other kind of things are, yes, issues of divorce, separation, illnesses as because as a result of mental or physical health issues that can be mental health or physical issues that can be disturbance within the relationship, there can be personality differences, maybe one person in the marriage has a personality disorder and as a result, there are common conflicts that arise. There could be unmet expectations that come about and as a result causing disillusionment within the family, within the marriage. Other issues of addictions, infertility, problems with in-laws, financial bankruptcy, housing issues, issues with jobs, so there can be a whole lot of concerns and issues that come about. And you would see even when you're looking at an extended part of the family is the kind of issues that children or adolescents face. So like we said, one big part is mental health among children, right? People, children with anxiety, children with mood disorders, with psychotic disorders, with OCD, all of this definitely require help medically also. Apart from that, you will have children or adolescents facing school challenges, either inability to cope with challenges at school, with anxieties that come up as a result, with pressure, peer pressure, with difficulties in learning. Now that again is another whole department of learning disorders, children finding it hard to write, to read, to do mathematics, to spell. All of that come under learning disabilities or any kind of anxieties that come about, separation anxiety, phobias, or even the inability to finding it anxious to go to school. So all of that comes under stressors in school. Now then also when it comes with children and adolescents with regard to their families, having parents who may be in continuous arguments, whether it's separation that's happened, whether it's divorce that's happened, there may be a mental illness among one of the family members. There can be death, there can be transitions of the job, transitions at work, moving to different cities. All of this can cause family stresses. There can be behavioural changes that you see in children having issues in their conduct, being deviant or defiant, being very oppositional in the way that they behave towards their parents. There are some things that you would see among children and adolescents. Adolescence, it's a greater, it's another area where as the children develop into adolescence, that stage of life having to cope with being able to cope, being able for parents to begin to see that the children are growing up, there is a need to build identity, there is a need for them to build into autonomy and the kind of issues that come about from that area. So when we're looking at working or dealing with multiple people in counseling, counseling with one individual itself is hard enough. Imagine when it's coming with multiple people, you're trying to work with each person in the family without being, without taking sides, without being judgmental, without providing advices, it can be something that can be a challenge. But there are certain guidelines if ever you are attempting to have family counseling or sitting a family together, is to know that every family member who's coming there needs to feel secure in your environment. So for example, let's say in a family where there is infidelity or adultery, that maybe one of the family members is in an adulterous relationship and you may have the parents as well as the children sitting there. Even the adulterous person there or the member of the family needs to feel secure in that place, because you're there to help and support the entire family, not join alongside with the rest of the family to pounce on the person. So that's not the idea. So one of the things that it's very important to do is while you're sitting in a family counseling, is to be a keen observant of what you are seeing as the inner dynamics that's happening in the family. And just by body language, just by the way, maybe they're seating positions, the way that they talk to one another, the way that they avoid looking, the way that they look, all will give you a better understanding to see what is the inner dynamics of the family, who's tearing up with who, who's against the other, what seems to be the relationship with one. So all of this can actually just be observed by taking a little bit of time to observe physically with your eyes through your vision, what's actually happening in that space. The counsellor here is not a referee. You're not there as a referee, neither are you there as a mediator, which means avoid being the middle person where you're taking information from one spouse or one family member into the counseling of another family member. You're not the mediator, that's not your job. In fact, something that I generally do is avoid having personally personal sessions with one person. If it's a family session, everyone comes together. Unless, of course, you know, there is maybe one off need where there is one person who's maybe very distressed and may need to show a little bit of support to them individually. Unless that's there, you tend to keep that as a, when you're not there as a referee, not there as a mediator, you're a facilitator. You're helping open up conversations. You're helping others see what are maybe the perceptions that they have towards the other person. So you are there as a person who is facilitating the communication, facilitating the way solutions can be come up to. Also, through a counseling session, it's important one is to find out what is the goals and the objectives of the family as they're coming in for counseling. So that's the first thing you need to determine is because each of them may have different goals. In the sense of one person may say, OK, I want to ensure that I change the person. The other may say, I want to work on the relationship. So it needs to be something that you come to a common goal. So the important question may be initially to ask is as part of our counseling or as part of this meeting, what do you want to see happen at the end of the session? So that actually makes them to think about what is it that they would want to build up and coming and listing. These are some of the goals that we would look into and let's start to explore and understand and then coming into action. It's important that each member of the family who's meeting with you should develop that sense of trust with you without feeling a sense of alienation from either from you as a counselor or from somebody else, someone else. And that's important to do, to be able to build the trust and the fact that also confidentiality that whatever is discussed will continue to be there and that you will not take this outside of discussion. That's why I meant when you're meeting families, never to meet them on an individual basis because it will almost feel that the other person seems not part of that entire process. So to continue to do that together as a group. Helping the families to, one is to really change the way they behave with each other. To be able to bring about the importance that every member of the family has a role to play in that relationship. Here it's, especially in a family setting, it's very important to get each member to personalize the problem. To come to a place to see where is it, what is it that they're contributing that can cause the issue. So they need to come to a place of saying that this is where they will do something that's going to help them help the whole system of the family. So can you just give me a minute and just a minute. So to end, what we're doing is to ensure that once they personalize the issue, we work alongside with them to change, to help them change behavior towards one another and towards the entire family. Next is, even as you're sitting with the family, to be able to draw wisdom and direction from the spirit, to know how to proceed, to be able to create that sense of oneness. Often, especially in situations where couples come together, where families come together. I've personally seen there have been many, many deadlocks. I come to a deadlock because there isn't a way to proceed, but to really, and that's the point you draw from God and say, God, I need direction of how to proceed. What is it that I can do to create this oneness over here? Give me the ideas or give me the understanding on how I can move forward with this. So just being able to get the wisdom from God, direction from the Holy Spirit. Now, when it comes to, especially a couple of, a Christian couple and establishing goals there, it's helpful to bring them back to scripture. And I would say, more than what you'd like to probably do or something that I'd like to do, is to bring about scripture and say, okay, this is what scripture says about the way maybe some issue in this relationship is how do we think we can live out the scripture? So rather than being in a place of advice, letting the word of God speak to them so that they are able to come to a place of understanding how they need to proceed. So especially for couples or families who are believers to be able to draw out from scripture and bring that back to them so that they are able to think and understand as to how they can move forward. So even as we've looked at all of these methods, remember that working with families, working with couples in itself can be draining, can be sometimes not very rewarding, but it actually matters just that you stand as a support system for the couple in itself can be a huge sense of help to them. Encouraging, praying, giving them a space to talk, giving them a space to actually communicate in itself is a huge source of help for them. If there are times that you're not able to handle it, it would be best to get the support of someone who can maybe work in a more detailed and a more intricate way with them. And usually we say that a couple or a family session, at least you need to have a couple of months of having those sessions to see some bit of change. And the expectation that within the first or the second meeting things will change, that that may be too lofty an expectation. So to ensure that they take that help, so encouraging a couple or a family to take that help over time to stay patient, to stay through the course is something that we as ministers can do. Okay, all right. We have 10 minutes. I'd like to open this up for any questions you all may have. 10 minutes of any questions. The class has been extremely quiet except for Pastor John. I think Divya and Jefina isn't here today. Yes, Paul. Yes, Pastor, I heard you talk about the issue of not meeting partners separately because we are not mediators, but to me as a person I think it is very, very important because at times there are things the other partner would not want the other one to know. Yet you as a facilitator you need to be aware of it so that you bring it into light. And that's why I see at times it may be important that separate meeting is important. There are certain things you need to know. Although you will keep them confidential, you need to know about the other partners. Sorry, Paul. During the facilitation you tried your best to see that issue as come out. Okay, yeah. So you're right that there may be certain information that may not have come out in the session which probably the person would like to tell you that's good. But I think we should be careful not to get into the position of being the one to relate whatever that sensitive topic to the other partner. That's something that we should avoid doing because there can be... Remember communication can always get tarnished through a process. So I personally don't follow that method because I think it adds up one accountability for every member to build that relationship. If they want to share something with me personally, yes, I permit that. Like I said, in some cases I do do that. If they want to share a certain information I do do that. But I don't encourage it too much. So personally that's my personal take on it. But if you see that's working for you, that's well and good. But being careful not being the mediator, not being the advice giver for either one of them or the person who comes to a place of calling out someone else's fault when someone is like, for example, maybe the husband may say, this is ABCD thing is what my wife does. But she will never tell you that. So maybe next in my counseling with the wife I'll say, hey, you shouldn't be doing ABCD things without any context of it. So I've got to be careful that I don't become that mediator, that I empower and equip the couple to be in a place of openness and honesty because that's what I would like that they come to a place of honesty. If there are certain sensitive matters that do not matter to the counseling session, then we can let it rest and let it lie if it doesn't impact the current marriage. Like for example, let's say a person says, a husband comes in and says, I'm having an affair with somebody else and the wife doesn't know about it. Now, this is not something that can be, yes it is, I have to keep it confidential, but it's not something that I will encourage that the husband stays in that part. So he's saying, I want to continue this relationship, what I want to build on that. Now that in itself is very skewed. It doesn't work that way. So we've got to be careful about how we need to equip our counselors or the members of the family to come as much as honest as possible to a place of restoration. So yeah, but thank you, thank you Paul for sharing that. Anybody else, any other question, any other thought and comment? Okay, I sense there's nothing. If there isn't, then I think we can close in five minutes to class, but we can close if there aren't any thoughts, any questions. Okay, all right, let's just pray together and we will wind up. Heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you, God, that you have brought us to places of influence and impact. God, there are many things in the world around that people face, challenges people face. God, and sometimes we feel quite illiquid to deal with these things, but God, we know that your wisdom, your knowledge, your power is their package. Give us the understanding that we need. Lord, give us the desire to know better. Father, to be able to take knowledge and use it, Lord, for the help of your kingdom. Father, even as we meet broken people, broken relationships, God, that we would only do things that are sensitive in the Spirit. Lord, to show others that we love, we care, we support, we want to build up. Lord, we pray, God, that you will work in and through us. Give us every wisdom we need, Father. Lord, we rely on you even as we work with people. Lord, our ministry God is with people, is with difficult, challenging people with problems, people with concerns. Father, and we ask Holy Spirit, that you give us the right words to speak at the right time, the right counsel, even the humility, Father, to be able to refer, to be able to move them to someone else who may be able to deal better. Thank you, God, for teaching us, for helping us. May we all, Lord, have a deserving Spirit. Give us, Lord, that spirit of wisdom, spirit of discernment as we work alongside your people. Thank you for each person, Lord, in class today for those who have not been able to join. Father, we pray for your mercy and your grace over you. Thank you once again. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen. Thank you all. We'll meet next week. Thank you very much. God bless. Thank you, Master.


The signal oil program. Yes, the signal oil program The whistler whistle is your signal for the signal oil program The whistler and I know many things for I walk by night I know many strange tales hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows Yes, I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak Friends, here's some exciting news. The latest hooper rating show that in the last two months the listening audience of the whistler has increased by more than 50 percent Yes, sir, 50 percent. And even before this increase the whistler was rated tops in popularity for a longer period of time than any other west coast program in radio history What do we at signal oil think about this? Well, naturally we think it's wonderful And we want to say thanks to our regular audience and welcome to all you new listeners And remember friends signal gasoline is tops too And now the whistler strange story Ticket to Paris The young attractive dark haired girl looked out through the dirty window pane of the old bookshop Watch the rain as it fell on olive street Then a few minutes after 10 she locked the shop door turned out the light and Stood for a moment in the dark She rubbed her arms and shuddered and then hurried through the darkened bookstore She would always live in terror of the dark of even the next moment So long as one man remained alive The man who was living only to kill her She'd been forced into the back streets of obscurity to escape him And though she despised this grim little bookshop where she worked for the old woman named Hattie Simmons The job paid for her keep provided her with more safety than she could find anywhere else As she reached the door to her room in the back of the shop. She stopped and listened There was someone in the room Searching the darkness she threw open the door and switched on the lights Hattie, what what are you doing here in my room? I I couldn't sleep and this old rocker here is so comfortable. I thought I'd come in and sit a while Oh My it's comfortable You don't mind do you dearie? No, I don't mind It's uh, it's the storm. I suppose makes me so restless Hattie Yes, dearie my trunk. I'm certain I had left it closed.  Well now I don't like to pick up the habit mind you But seeing that I can't sleep perhaps these would be better for you Oh The sleeping tablets. Yes. I was looking for them the box was here on the table Dear me my eyes, you know, there you are Madeleine it um It always struck me kind of queer a young girl like yourself taking so many of these pills They're harmless Yeah, I suppose but you always seem to have so much on your mind, dearie. Yes. I have many things on my mind, Hattie Yes, and Madeleine, yes, uh while I was looking for sleeping pills. I noticed your name on the trunk Uh, didn't think poor tear was spelled that way. But yeah, you are T. I. E. R Oh, I couldn't help but notice something else, dearie Inside the trunk A gun Of course I have a gun during the war many french women had guns.  I'm very tired. All right. All right, Madeleine Uh, you close up the shop. All right. Yes, it's locked never know when we might have thieves, you know Huh? Good night, dearie.  Oh, you frightened me What what are you doing here George and a guy come around to see his old aunt once in a while Hattie has gone to bed fine. I really didn't come around to see her anyway. I'm sorry. I'm going out. Hey What's your hurry George? Please let me by I'm raining baby Terrible night to be out. Please much better to stay in Curl up with a good look or something Madeleine Madeleine is that you out there? I thought you said the old go to go into bed Madeleine Madeleine, what? Oh, it's you. What are you doing here, George? That seems to be the burning question of the week Good evening aunt Hattie Madeleine. I thought you were going to bed. No, I I decided to go for a walk in this weather dearie. Don't worry about me Hattie Good night A quarter of an hour later you step off the streetcar Hurray toward the low red brick building in the middle of the block At the entrance the doorman greets you Good evening, miss. This is the sequoian club. Yes, it is. Well a newspaper man or mr. Tennyson is giving a lecture here Could I go? Oh, it's over miss over ten minutes ago Oh, but mr. Tennyson is he still no no no he left But I must see him. It is important. Well, I think you'll find him across the street at the bar He was headed in that direction when I saw him last the bar. Thank you. Thank you very much Drink no, well if you won't have a drink, what's on your mind? Mr. Tennyson There was a story in the paper yesterday About a man a german named hindstott hindstott. Yeah, that's one of my stories What about it? This man they're holding in a palace prison. The french government is not certain He is really hindstott. No, they're not plastic surgery is a great thing But certainly they are weird. They know what they're doing. It'll take a little time You were sure you won't have a drink. No Ah Well, it's uh, it's hindstott all right Look, uh, what makes you so interested in this? Oh I am curious. Yeah, that's been established. I used to know him. So When during your war in my country when the nazis occupied paris You speak pretty good english for a man cell. I was educated in england I see And just uh, how did you and this hindstott get along? Not very well. I am afraid. I'm sorry You You have heard of the shuttle polane I've been there It used to be hindstott's headquarters in paris So well before the war I worked at the shuttle for a very fine family Then hindstott took over only the servants remained. We were forced to work for hindstott not very pleasant, huh? especially for a girl Pretty one of that it was unpleasant for several of us So now you'd like to see hindstott get what's coming to him, but first they must be certain It is the right man. There must be no mistake. Oh, there won't be but like I said before it'll take time It wouldn't take me to any time I would know him instantly Why are you looking at me like that? You are pretty very pretty Yeah You look good on the front page. What my picture my syndicate could use a follow-up story on hindstott French girl tells all sinister figure of paris occupation think of the publicity baby Wouldn't do you a bit of harm and with the movie studios only a stone. No, I'm not interested Well, that's a switch I was sure that's what you were driving at. Excuse me, mr. Tennyson. I must go in just a minute. Please What's really on your mind? Nothing Nothing at all Why? You interest me There's something about you that's a little different and I like people who are different I like to know what makes them tick In your case, I think I'm going to enjoy finding out With the prologue of ticket to paris the signal oil company brings you another strange story by the whistler Because the past several months of cold weather have been particularly tough on car batteries Here's some news that's worth remembering There's now available an improved type battery, which is not only much more powerful but lasts far far longer I'm referring to the new signal deluxe battery sold only at signal service stations Unlike ordinary batteries, which may be guaranteed for 12 or 18 months Signal deluxe batteries are guaranteed a full 30 months on a service basis Also signal deluxe batteries deliver up to 35 percent more power to give you quick dependable starting And to take care of the many electrical gadgets on modern cars The secret of this superior performance in signal deluxe batteries is their superior construction Which includes the latest type all rubber separators plus an improved design all rubber case which requires water less often When you take into account the generous trade-in signal dealers are now offering for old batteries You can see why any way you look at it. This is today's best battery buy So be sure you remember the name of this extra powerful battery That's guaranteed a full 30 months the signal deluxe battery And remember where you get it at your nearest signal service station And now back to the whistler The thought of your picture in the newspaper the publicity frightened you doesn't And that's why you ran away from the correspondent named tennis The man you went to for information on the german who is now being held in a paris prison You hurry back to the little bookshop spend a sleepless night wondering if the prisoner is Heinz stop You wonder too about the newspaper If he really meant it when he said that he would find out more about you The next day find you in the bookshop as usual and by afternoon you're convinced you've seen the last of tennis When suddenly a voice behind you. Pardon me. I'm interested in a mystery called. Why doesn't ma'am the cell want to picture take Mr. Tennis How did you find me? Yeah, let's go next door. We'll talk about it over coffee. No, I'm alone in the shop Besides there's nothing to talk about.  Why are you afraid madeline? How did you know the carp on the beat said it was madeline? Madeline what see monu? uh-uh How about portier Mr. Tennyson What do you want of me? I want to know why you're so interested in hindstack or the guy they think is hindstack I told you. Yeah, but not all of it So he was a big nasty character all right The day of the liberation of paris hindstack was prepared to abandon the shuttle I locked him in a room so the americans would capture him He pleaded with me promised anything if I would let him go When I refused he swore he would kill me if he ever got away So that's it and he did break out of there before our boys reached the chateau Yes, I knew that as long as he was at large somewhere in paris. I was not safe I see So you had to get out of paris. Yes Later I I came to america Still don't feel too safe from hindstack, huh? Well, I've heard that a few germans have been able to sneak into this country and it's possible that hindstack may be here now Any publicity about you would lead them right to your doorstep. That's right You see mr. Tennyson why it's so important to me that I find out if that man in the paris prison is really hindstack You're sure. Well, I'm not going to twist your arm. We'll uh, we'll just forget the story Mr. Tennyson You have contact with these things Perhaps you will let me know when word comes when the man is identified. Yes. I'll do that I'll let you know. Thank you Thank you very much The day is passed slowly, don't they madeline and alan tenison doesn't call You wonder what is causing the delay why the french authorities can't make up their minds about the man in prison Perhaps you tell yourself the government has decided the man isn't hindstack And that the matter has been quietly shelved.  Thank you Oh, wait a champagne the lady's here champagne. It's an occasion madeline. Wait, you have something to tell me. Please don't keep me in suspense Listen for you April in paris No, wait. No, wait. Wait. Wait. There's still the champagne fit in this bottle since 1922 Ah, there you are sir Mr. Tenison, please tell me we'll drink to it madeline your glass the uh The wire came this afternoon That man in prison. He was hindstack. Yes, not a doubt in the world They were going to force him to stand trial, but he didn't escape again. No He's dead swallowed poison. Oh, no Oh Delight or remorse Well in in winning we can afford some sympathy for the loser.  You're thinking of only one thing Where to get the money for your ticket? You're so deep in thought that you don't even notice officer davis outside the shop. He looks at you concerned What oh officer davis inside hatty and that nephew of hers, george Uh-huh. They're having a lulu of a fight. I started to go in but I'll take care of it officer davis. It's nothing You see what I mean George let me buy but Oh, well, he's hot tempered all right And if looks could kill excuse me officer davis. I've got to talk to hatty. Yeah, sure I'll be moving along there. Was that no good nephew coming back. I was just hiding this strongbox Now there another quarrel hattie. Yes over the usual thing money. Oh Hattie yes Hattie I must return to paris. I had a call. I have to return once return Oh, I'll hate to lose you madeline come to count on you a lot. Thank you But it is very necessary that I go soon That depends. I haven't the money for tickets. Oh, I was wondering Well, had he could you lend me the money just for a little while lend you that Dearie, you you know I'm fond of you, but you also know I'm not young anymore I need what little I have You must be able to get it somewhere. No, I'm not. I don't know anyone else. No one that I could even ask You you can't turn me down hattie. Please madeline I've had all the scrambles about money that I can stand for one night, but hattie I will pay it I said no Now good night, dearie She's refused you madeline when you counted on her so much, but it isn't over. Is it? No, it can't be you have to get to paris even if it means stealing the money You'll be able to repay hattie three times over The following afternoon the opportunity you've been waiting for presents itself Hattie leaves the shop You wait a half hour after she's gone to be sure she's not just on an errand to the corner store Then you close the shop hurry to hattie's room and go to the drawer where she's placed the strong box It's still there Pick it up hurry back to your own room and there you try to force the lock and then Well, sweetheart, they seem to have the same ideas about things. George. Yeah, that's right. George Boy with the key to the front door I'll take the strong box, baby. No. Oh, but yes Give it to me And you can tell my dear aunt that she won't be seeing me for some time. No, George. You mustn't take that.  It's your trunk your own And suddenly you remember there's a gun in the side Madeline put that down.  I want to talk to you. Say it about an hour or so an hour. I don't All right, mr. Tennyson Yes Do come by It's a way out, isn't it madeline a sudden way out that's about to be given to you A little later you've unlocked the front door Put the strong box back in its place and you've turned your room into a shambles Upset the lamps scuff the rugs pull things from the dresser drawers When Tennyson arrives and walks in you're in the middle of it all aren't you yes Sprawled out apparently in deep sleep the gun clutched tightly in your hand Madeline madeline wonders it wake up. Mr. Tennyson Is this your gun my gun Yes madeline one of you done what's happened here.  I looked in his wallet George George holly. He's dead. You didn't know What is it mr. Tennyson? What has happened here the room look do you remember me calling you a while ago? Yeah Yes, I remember what happened since then come on think hard Right after your call. Yes Hattie she came in Hattie George's aunt She owns the shop was he here when she came in no Just had in me She mentioned him though They quarreled again quarreled over money. They were always quarreling over money our money George thinks some of it belongs to him. It was left by a rally. All right.  Then what happened? Nothing much. We had some wine together and is that what put you to sleep? No, I felt sleepy like when I When I take my sleeping pill I see Madeline, where's hattie now? I don't know. Uh-huh You uh You know something madeline. This is all too packed What do you mean? Look at this room the way things have been tossed around I don't think there was a struggle here at all. You don't this whole setup is a phony The room was made to look like it'd been a struggle this lamp on the floor. It didn't fall It was placed there the bookcase. It was pulled from the wall. Mr. Tennyson Look madeline, I've been suspicious of you right from the start you and that hindstack guy I like to do my own explaining find my own answers Last night I got to thinking you might have been hindstack's girlfriend His girlfriend? Yes. He had one, you know a french girl named deyenne roger. Jean roger, but she's dead She threw herself into the seine on the night of the occupation. Yeah, that's the answer your government sent me this afternoon Then what you were thinking last night last night doesn't matter or what I thought then the important thing now Is the dead man behind that screen? But you do believe me like I said This whole thing is a little too paris a frame and had he could have framed She would do this too.  Oh, I'm glad to see it that way Uh-huh. I better call the police now. Thank you, mr. Tennyson. Thank you very much The whistler will return in just a moment with the strange ending to tonight's story But now a message from missing drivers I mean drivers who are missing something and that means you if you're not powering your car with signal the famous go farther gasoline One thing you're missing is that good good mileage Which has made signal gasoline known throughout six western states from canada to mexico as the go farther gasoline But equally important you're missing the superior performance in today's signal gasoline which makes such mileage possible You see in order for today's signal to help you get the most from every drop of gasoline It has to help your motor run more efficiently And when your motor runs more efficiently you also enjoy quicker starting faster pickup and smoother power So you see in gasoline mileage and performance do go hand in hand That's why signal says to be sure of the tops in gasoline quality. There are just two things to remember One it takes extra quality to go farther And two Signal is the famous go farther gasoline And now back to the whistler You congratulate yourself madeline your plans seem successful You're certain you've sold alan tenison on the idea that you were the victim of a plot by hatting That she had killed her nephew and had fixed the blame on you And now it looks like he's going to help you because he seems convinced of hatty's guilt You listen as he calls the police and tells them what's happened Then he calls his newspaper Minutes later. He's back in your room and you notice a strange expression on its face Is something wrong one of the boys just cable the story from paris The french authorities found a fortune and jewels in the cellars of the chateau polliné. Oh, no You seem disappointed You know that hunch I had last night Maybe I was right after all Maybe hindsted's girlfriend diane roger didn't jump in the same the night of the occupation Maybe it was the real mademoiselle portier who was pushed into the river How about that dion? You will never be able to prove it mr. Tenon's now. I guess not What about the dead man over there george holly hatty tried to frame me Madeline madeline. Hello hatty Officer davis. How are you miss? So the police found you hatty found me. What are you talking about dearie? I've been with officer davis all afternoon. We went down to long beach Hattie wanted someone to go along with her protection, you know And it was my afternoon Protection that's right dearie forget what I said last night. I changed my mind I decided to go down to the bank where my brother works to get the money you wanted for your ticket to paris Let that whistle be your signal for the signal oil program the whistler Each sunday night at this same time brought to you by the signal oil company marketers of signal gasoline and motor oil And fine quality automotive accessories Signal has asked me to remind you to get the most driving pleasure drive at sensible speeds be courteous and obey traffic regulations It may save a life Possibly your own Featured in tonight's story were nan boardman and eddy mar The whistler was produced and directed by george w allen with story by robert steven brody and music by wilbur hatch And was transmitted to our troops overseas by the armed forces radio service All characters portrayed on the whistler program are fictional any similarity to names or resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental Remember at this same time next sunday another strange tale by the whistler marvin miller speaking This is cbs the columbia broadcasting system