When coach, speaker and author Jack Pransky first heard about the changes happening in the community of Modello, Florida, he knew he had to find out more. Pretty quickly he ended up writing a book about Roger Mills’ work using the Three Principles in that community, which was radically changing lives. Since then he’s written several books about the understanding, including its history, and he continues to be passionate about sharing its simplicity and impact.

Dr. Jack Pransky is a Three Principles Author, Trainer and Practitioner: a Coach of Coaches and a Counselor of Counselors.

Jack is a national and international consultant, speaker, and author who has worked in the field of prevention and community organizing since 1968.

You can find Jack Pransky at InsideOutUnderstanding.com and on Facebook at Jack Pransky.

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. 

Show Notes

Alexandra: Jack Pransky, welcome to Unbroken.

Jack: I’m very happy to be here.

Alexandra: So nice to meet you.

Jack: Nice to meet you too. It’s a pleasure.

Alexandra: Thank you.

Jack: So many people have heard this story that I have a hard time recreating. I was involved in the field of prevention for many, many years; prevention of problem behaviors, alcohol and drug abuse, child abuse, domestic violence, delinquency, or things like that. I got to the point where I sort of knew what I was doing. And, decided to write a book about it, called Prevention, The Critical Need.

Just before that book was about to go to press, I was invited to a Prevention Conference. Roger Mills was speaking. And I was suspicious, because I just spent three years of my life trying to find out what worked, and I’d never heard of this guy. But when he brought a couple of people with him from the housing project that he worked in, he was talking about how the housing projects, which is a horrible place, had gotten completely turned around. I could tell from listening to these people that their lives would never be the same, like something deeply had happened with them that we were not used to seeing and prevention.

So that’s what got me hooked. I ended up asking Roger Mills if I could write a book about happened in Modello. And so I did that. And then I had to find the source. And the source was Syd Banks. And the rest is history.

Alexandra: As they say. Well, that was one of my questions.

Jack: Modello was known to be one of the most difficult places near Miami, Florida. It was really kind of a horrible community to have to live in. Because there was violence everywhere. Drug gangs were in every corner. There were shootings, tremendous domestic violence, tremendous abusing kids, crack addiction, it was just horrible.

Roger Mills, thought this would be the place to test out whether Syd Banks’ ideas, what he had uncovered, would work in a place of that magnitude, as opposed to the individual people who were hovering around him at the time. And so he went in there, armed with only his knowledge and understanding of the Three Principles. It might not have even been called Three Principles then. And hope, and being able to see through the presenting behavior to the core of health and beauty inside people.

He also never gave up, even though a lot of them wanted him out of there and did everything they could to get him out of there. A few people at first started catching on. And then they got together as a as a group that served as both a kind of like a parenting course and PTA and also doubled as a tenant’s counsel for the area.

Little by little people started catching on more, and even though maybe 10 or 12 people really caught on to it, and their lives changed completely. It had a ripple effect throughout the whole rest of the housing project and the whole housing project changed. And it took two and a half years.

Alexandra: When you wrote the book about this experience, so you mentioned that you wanted to get back to the source of where this idea had come from.

Jack: I did. I heard that my cousin George Pransky was doing a seminar with him in Vancouver. And I was supposed to be doing a prevention training in Atlanta, I believe. They were paying for me to get to Atlanta and back. So I bargained with them to ship me over to Vancouver and back. At that time, staying over Saturday night made it much, much cheaper. And so I bumped into Syd Banks.

At that time, at first he said he couldn’t see me and couldn’t talk because he had people coming in from all over the world. But then somehow, I ended up at a lunch with him and bunch of other people. And that’s where he literally blew my mind apart. I wrote that story up in Seduced by Consciousness. It’s an amazing story to me. But that’s only because what happened to be is indescribable, so it’s in my head, my own head.

Jack: I tried to then convince the field of prevention that going in the Inside Out direction was more efficacious than going outside in. And I was basically met with deaf ears. I mean, some people caught on, and that was beautiful. And their lives were changed. And they were able to help others even better. But as far as the entire field goes, No.

Because at that time, interestingly, this whole notion of what first was called research, proven programs, and then was called evidence-based programs and came in and so they started only paying attention to the program’s prevention programs that had a lot of research behind them, that showed that they were good, and they put all of their money into that. There was no room for innovation.

Anyone in the Three Principles world or health realization, as it was called, at the time, didn’t have big money for research. All the little research that we did was showing great effects, but we couldn’t show it on like a peer reviewed kind of level that we can do today.

Jack: No.

Alexandra: Oh, still to this day.

Jack: To this day. I’m not totally giving up on it. But it’s harder to do from a retired or semi-retired perspective.

Alexandra: Yeah, I imagine.

Jack: I am apparently doing a keynote speech for the New Zealand and Australian Mental Health Association in May, and talking to a bunch of traditional psychologists. And we’ll see how that goes.

Jack: I did a keynote for their organization, many, many years ago when I was first getting into the principles, but I was doing it on prevention at the time, but didn’t know enough about the three principles then to speak with it with great authority.

Alexandra: One of the things I wanted to talk to you about today was you had mentioned in a blog post recently about the wisdom of waiting for clarity, and especially in a crisis. And this is one of the first things that I really learned from the Three Principles. And it may have been from your, your book, actually, that where I first saw that mentioned just that.

There’s no need to rush into making a decision that waiting for clarity is such a valuable tool. I’d love for you to talk about that a little bit.

Jack: Well, first of all, if it’s really an emergency, and you have to do something right away, then you have to do something right away. You do whatever you can do in that situation right away. But more often than not, we tend to react to crises and emergencies through our typical knee jerk reaction kind of thinking. And if we do that, it’s not going to come out that way.

Our wisdom is embedded in us, in our spiritual essence. And we can only hear it when our mind quiets, and clears. It’s always speaking to us. But we can only hear when our mind quiets or clears. And that’s what we want to be guided by in life, with crises or pretty much anything.

When I learned to do that, instead of plowing ahead with my typical thinking, it really changed everything. Now I really take a step back, wait for my mind to clear. It doesn’t always happen right away. And I know that when I hear wisdom, speak to me, it has a like a knowing and a certainty about it. That feel that sounds different, and it feels different. And so that’s what I am guided by. And that’s what I hope to be got.

Alexandra: Me too. I noticed when I was first learning about this understanding, because preparing the questions for you, I was sort of reflecting on this. And when I was first exploring this understanding, I noticed that if I was in a situation, and I felt like I had two choices, and neither of them felt quite right, and I hadn’t had that moment of clarity, I would get impatient after a day or two, and I would just pick one, and carry on that way.

Inevitably, it wouldn’t work out as well. I learned that sometimes clarity takes a minute to arrive. And there was never any pressure. I wasn’t in an emergency situation. I just had to learn to wait for that feeling.

Jack: It also doesn’t always sound logical. The wise thing to do doesn’t always sound logical. Sometimes it sounds really weird. And I’ve learned to trust it anyway. It’s hard at first.

Alexandra: I was so used to trusting my brain. And I still slip up sometimes. And that’s okay.

Jack: It’s actually not even a new muscle. It’s like a releasing of all muscle. The wisdom can come up to us, through or through us, from God knows where.

Alexandra: The first book that I read of yours was Somebody Should Have Told Us. That book introduced me to the idea of not thinking our way out of problems, which was really new to me, and a little disorienting at first.

Jack: Well, in a way, it’s just what we were just talking about, because we all have intellects some are stronger than others. And for the most part, we have tried to use our intellect to get through life. And it hasn’t always worked because the place of wisdom and insight comes from a completely different realm. It’s something that really does come through us and not is manufactured by us. But the intellect is kind of manufactured by us.

With wisdom, we’re releasing all the stuff that we know. And we go into I don’t know mode. And I don’t know mode is a really beautiful because it clears the decks. And it allows for things to bump up to us, to come into us. And it’s such a beautiful thing when that happens.

I was talking to, I think I put this in Seduced by Consciousness, I was talking to a medical doctor one time, doing some coaching with him. He applies his intellect, to everything. And so I said to him, if somebody comes to you, and you’ve gone through all your intellect, and something isn’t quite right, and you don’t know what it is, do you bear down and apply your intellect more? Or do you take a step back? And wait for clarity.

He said, I take a step back, and I wait for clarity. Now, he was not doing it with his primary relationship at home. So I said, Well, if it works there, why wouldn’t it work there. But he couldn’t, perhaps, couldn’t handle that idea, for some reason. Because he had different thinking about what a relationship with dealing with the relationship was like, and what dealing with at work, medical practice was slow. So, that was a very interesting conversation. I’ll never forget it.

Jack: Well, yeah, what’s worked for them? In the past, they didn’t know what was going on. In my trainings, I used to ask people all the time, what are you doing when you get your best ideas?

People would come up with things like taking a walk, which is before I’m going to sleep, just when I’m waking up, when I’m in the shower, doing the dishes. The common denominator and all of those things is the mind relaxes.

That’s what we want to happen if we want to really see our way through things, we want our mind to relax. And the tendency is to do the opposite. The tendency is to bear down so that we can get it right because sometimes stepping back and waiting for clarity feels too passive or something. But it really isn’t. We could bear down and really make something happened. But as you described at the beginning, it doesn’t always work out.

Alexandra: So many big decisions in my life, I find every time I’ve gotten 10 miles down a road and then realized I didn’t want to be on that road it was because I forced a decision and didn’t wait for clarity. Every time.

Jack: And the other part of what is built into our spiritual essence, is pure peace, and pure love. And that’s what exists or resides in everyone. Even people, like the people in Modello who were having all of those horrible problems, everyone. And when we can first see that, well first find ourselves, then see that and other people and then help people see that in themselves. That’s what really makes a difference.

And to know that we can only think our way away from it. That’s the most humbling thing to me of all. We’ve got all this beautiful stuff inside us, which is there already. We’re looking for it, but it’s there already. And yet, we can only get in our own way. There’s nothing about the three principles that is more amazing to me and humbling than that. And when people catch on to that their lives change.

Alexandra: That’s so great. We touched on prevention earlier in your work, both before and after you found discovered the Three Principles.

Jack: Well, the spirituality of prevention was something I actually got into before I found the Three Principles. Very few people in the prevention field were looking in that direction. But I was on a spiritual search before I bumped into the Three Principles which then screeched to a halt.

Before that I was going all over the place. I was reading all kinds of spiritual books, I was listening to spiritual talks. And I was trying to grasp what about those things could be applied to the prevention field. And so that’s what spirituality prevention was about, essentially.

There were practices like meditation, and yoga, and all those kinds of things. And it was all over the place. And myself and a couple of partners of mine, we had formed a group called prevention unlimited. And we put on the first spirituality of prevention conference in the in the country. And that was right about the time when I was starting to first get into the Three Principles.

I gave a workshop there on that, on that day, and now, I really see the principles as the only real way to get a grasp on spirituality and prevention. I may be prejudiced, but it really has worked for me. I’ve seen so many lives change as a result that most people who work in prevention don’t see. And so you couldn’t knock me off the step.

Alexandra: And so often, when it comes to things like addiction, people are talking about recovery.

Jack: Anybody really, but particularly communities that what we used to do in outside in prevention, is you we would we would give people information. We would teach skills, we would build supports, we would create healthy environments, in the hope that those things would help people’s minds to change and they and they would experience healthy self-perceptions.

Which would in turn help people have a sense of health and well-being about themselves. And that was, that was the idea.

It starts with the premise, as I was saying before, that we all have health and well-being inside us already. It’s just covered up with by our own thinking, and when we can point people in that direction, then they start to see that in themselves. They start gaining healthy self-perceptions. They work to change the conditions in their environment. They make things better for themselves around themselves. And that’s how prevention starts from the inside and goes out. And then when a critical mass of people and a community like Modello catches on, it can change entire communities.

Jack: I hear that it’s been completely turned into a different kind of housing. But even at the time, Hurricane Andrew came by and wiped out the entire community. I went down there a month after that. And the place has been blown apart, literally. Half of everybody’s house is gone. And so you couldn’t really tell whether it would have had lasting effect over the years. Except if you trace the lives of the people, which is what I did. And their lives continued to be healthy and change even in the face of that.

Alexandra: Wow. What a testament, given that, everything they’ve been through. That’s amazing.

Jack: Yeah. And it is the model for how this can be so helpful to humanity. I personally wish that more people involved in the Three Principles were taking it into communities. Once Roger Mills died that emphasis fizzled.

Jack: Well, he had a really good attitude about it, it would be a challenge for most people. It was a little for him. People did everything in their power to get you out of there. Which you can totally understand. But his attitude was, of course, they’re going to be acting this way toward me, given the way that they’re thinking, force attitude to it. But that’s not the way they really are.

So yeah, it’s more difficult than coaching people one on one. It’s more difficult than going to businesses. It’s more difficult than working in groups with people to go into communities like that. But it’s the biggest bang for the buck, you could say.

Syd Banks always had this feeling that the Three Principles were meant to be helpful to humanity. And that we are to be of service to people. And that, to me, needs to be and continue to be the primary emphasis.

Alexandra: I love that. That’s great.

Speaking of which, you mentioned you’re sort of semi-retired now. I noticed on your blog – we’re recording this in very early January 2024 – you thought of December 31 as kind of the retirement day of last year.

Jack: Oh, it didn’t work out that way. It’s kind of a joke, really. But I consider myself semi-retired to being fully retired. I pretty much wait for people to find me if they do and if they don’t, I’m happy. I have worked to keep me going.

Alexandra: You mentioned the word service and I love that.

Jack: It is. I’m afraid to say that it is. I really do still I have this. I don’t know whether you’d call it an urge or desire or something to be helpful to humanity as much as I can. So even though right now, most of my focus is on writing a book about my hobby, music, I still cannot. When people contact me about doing something like yourself, I can’t turn away from it.

Alexandra: I love that. Thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it. So we’re getting sort of towards the end of our time together.

Jack: Well, I want to re-emphasize something. The principles really, at its essence, only means two things:

And we can, in our thoughts get picked up by our consciousness, and consciousness, its job is to make it look real. So it sends it through our senses. And it makes it look very, very real to us. Which is why we get deluded into thinking that it’s reality, as opposed to just an illusion of our own thinking.

When we’re able to see our problems as illusions of our own thinking, we are free. And those two things, to me, are all we need to know about the three principles. And it’s only a question of going deeper into what those two things really mean. People make it very complicated. Syd Banks was always telling us, we make it much too complicated, just beginning to grasp a tiny bit of what he was talking. Took me years to get there.

Jack: It makes people scratch their heads at first, which is good. But whatever we think and believe, with more thinking, we’re going to get seduced by as reality. Very tricky. Because it’s almost like the ego’s job to make us believe it. Because it doesn’t want to relinquish itself. It’s like holding onto itself, dear life. It will do everything in its power so that we don’t realize this.

Alexandra: So true. That’s so great.

Jack: My website is not really that active, but it is InsideOutUnderstanding.com. People can look me up on Facebook, /Jack Pransky. I posted a couple of things that I’m doing in my semi retirement one thing I’m excited about is when I go to Australia, I’m working with a couple of people to do a training now in Bali, which is on my bucket list. So things like that, or keep me going.

Alexandra: Nice. I will put links in the show notes to your website. And we’ve mentioned your books a couple of times. So let’s just talk about that. So your books are mentioned on your website as well. They are.

Jack: Somebody Should Have Told Us is probably my most popular book. It’s the one that people look to for an entry into the three principles a lot. And Seduced by Consciousness is the advanced version of that.

Modello is just an incredible story. And I’m not saying that because I wrote it because it was incredible story before I wrote it down of how step by step and the story of how this horrible community was completely changed around.

Parenting From The Heart is based on the Three Principles. One called Hope for All, which is interviews, extensive interviews with people whose lives have turned around but Three Principles and then are going off and working with others.

Paradigm Shift is about the history of the Three Principles. I’ve co-written a couple of books for kids, little kids, and one curriculum for middle school students. So I’ve been involved in writing. Plus, I’ve co-authored a bunch of research articles, peer reviewed research articles with Tom Kelly. So that’s what I that’s what I do mostly, and I’m a writer.

Alexandra: I’m so glad that you captured the story of Modello and also the history of the Three Principles in Paradigm Shift. It feels so important that those things don’t get lost. And I love that you did that. They must have been enormous projects.

Jack: They were much bigger than I thought they were going to be.

Alexandra: I think it’s so important historically to see to see how that have those things happened. Well, thank you so much, Jack Pransky, for being with me here today. I really appreciate it.

Jack: My pleasure. It was fun.

Alexandra: Bye.

Featured image photo by Olivier Miche on Unsplash

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