I’m not even sure how to say this — I’m still kind of in shock — but...

Check this out: I recently got an email from my dad, who’s 84 years old. He started off by sharing a thread of inspirational quotes (some with attribution, some without), like:

"Your circumstances may be uncongenial, but they shall not remain so if you perceive an ideal and strive to reach it." — James Allen

"Excellence means commitment to completion."

"Success is not a destination, but a journey. It is not something you get, it is something you are becoming. It never ends; it is infinite in terms of growth."

Then he added this:

"I apologize for the length of this post. You’ve seen much of it in the past, but the context may be new. I worked with a man in California, Al Tomsik, early seventies, who had a business promoting good ideas and concepts that would lead to success, in any venture...

The wealth and understanding he had at his fingertips would blow you away. He first introduced me to the stick-man. Anyway, just put this away for sometime..."

Wait... hold on — did I just read that right??

I needed some clarification:

"Wait a minute — you knew about the stickman in the 1970s?? The stickman I learned from Bob Proctor, or something else?"

I wanted to know if he had actually encountered Dr. Thurman Fleet’s Mind Model before I ever introduced it to him. His reply was simple and flat:

"Affirmative... I didn’t use it in the 70’s, but Tomsik used it when I worked for him. It’s in my files from that era..."

He continued:

"I don’t know the exact date I encountered it. The class material I used for Tomsik and the Stick Man was when we were in California."

(Is this what it looks like when a generous father humors his excited daughter, only to reveal he's actually known all along?)

Honestly, I had a hard time wrapping my head around this. I mean — how could I spend twenty years of my life teaching this concept without ever knowing my dad had already learned about it back when I was just a baby?

So I replied:

"How come I don't remember you ever mentioning this? This is kind of huge — to find out my dad was learning this when I was a baby!"

Turns out, he learned about the stickman concept from Al Tomsik sometime between May 9 and September 1, 1970 — about four months before I was born.

I never knew!

I guess I was bound to find it one way or another.

(Fun fact: My dad's name isn’t Robert — it’s literally just Bob. That's what’s written on his birth certificate.)

As we emailed back and forth, he shared some of his actual notes from that 1970 training. I still can’t believe I’ve been teaching this for two decades and only now found this out. Maybe he did mention it once upon a time and I just didn’t remember. Either way, what a treasure to have this now:

*"Dr. Thurman Fleet in the 1930s, in San Antonio, Texas...

'You are going to have to alter some ideas in your mind, but in order to do that, you are going to have to have a picture to work with...'

He spoke of the Concept Therapy movement... about treating the cause instead of just the symptoms... about holistic healing, and how no person had ever seen the mind — so he made a picture of it: a stick figure.

He described the conscious mind, the subconscious mind, and explained how understanding the relationship between the two was the key to real, lasting change..."*

Al Tomsik even emphasized:

"You can do anything you want, but understand this: if you don’t know how this works, you haven’t got a snowball’s chance of doing it."

It’s possible my dad never shared it with me before because, even though it clearly stuck with him (he still had the notes!), life back then was hard. He was underemployed, earning only $400 over three months — the equivalent of about $3000 today — trying to support a family of five with another baby on the way (me).

It was a stressful time in my parents' marriage, and even though his results weren't immediate, he believed in the power of the subconscious mind. Eventually, he built an impressive career in quality control, contracting internationally, developing curriculum, and writing textbooks for university-level training programs.

He may not have sat me down to explain the stickman, but growing up, I still absorbed the belief that the mind was a powerful tool. My mom read Psycho-Cybernetics in the '70s and used what she learned about affirmations to help me memorize spelling words.

And Dad? He sparked my love of brain teasers — teaching me that no problem was too big to solve.

Later, it was probably his passion for electronics that made me curious about things like how our remote control could change TV channels without even needing a battery (something I talk about all the time now at Genius Bootcamp).

Investigating that phenomenon eventually helped my students understand how thoughts can have real, measurable, detectable effects on their circumstances.

Dad also used to let me play with the equipment at his electronics lab where he taught high school.

I’d sit on a tall stool in front of the black screens, flipping oscilloscope switches and twisting knobs to see how I could make the green wavy lines dance: 

Looking back, those moments planted seeds — helping me stay curious, and maybe even priming me to understand the Law of Vibration when I later learned about it from Bob Proctor.

(If you want to learn more about how universal laws impact your results, you can read the FREE ebook Hidden Treasures.)

History behind the Radio Analogy

You may have heard me talk about the radio analogy — how tuning in to the right "frequency" determines what you experience in life. It’s not just a cool metaphor — it's kind of personal.

In 1974, when I was three, my dad built a real radio station — KOHS — that still exists today. He literally erected the tower by hand, trained his electronics students how it all worked, and got the station running:

(Orem Geneva Times, October 31, 1974)

Here’s Dad with some of his students at Orem High School:

Anyway, life is funny. It's fun to learn new things... but it's even "funner" to look back and see how experiences — even decades-old ones — were quietly working together to prepare you for your life today.

It's honestly amazing to realize my own father was learning about the stick-man while I was still in my mother's womb.

Have you ever had a moment where something from your past turned out to be way more significant to your journey than you realized at the time?

What experiences have shaped you and brought you to where you are today?

It’s definitely something worth pondering

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