Prakash Interviewed Once Again
Update: 2016-04-27
Description
Interview with the author Dr. Om Prakash
by Seth Greene
Award winning president of Marketing Magic
March 5, 2016
Read synopsis here
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Seth Greene: |
Today I have the good fortune to be interviewing Dr. Om Prakash. Dr. Prakash, thank you so much for joining us today.
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| Dr. Om Prakash: | You’re welcome.
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| Seth Greene: | We are glad you’re here. Let’s go back in time a little bit to where did you grow up?
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| Dr. Om Prakash: | I grew up in Delhi, the capitol city of India. We lived very close to the University of Delhi, walking distance from our home. All of us went to the university in time as we grew up.
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| Seth Greene: | What did your parents do?
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| Dr. Om Prakash: | My father was a clerk in the post and telegraph department of the government of India. My mother was a homemaker. There are six of us – five boys, one girl. Our sister was the apple of our parents’ eyes – we all adored her. All of us have graduate degrees, and three of us are here in this country. I helped two of them to come to US. These two live in California, and I am in Texas. My sister is a homemaker, and out of the two of my other brothers, one of them was the Vice President of a Rayon factory in Bombay, with a 15,000-labor force. He was a social worker by trade. He is retired now. The other one is an engineer who lives in the same ancestral home we all grew up.
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| Seth Greene: | How did you get inspired to become a clinical psychologist?
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| Dr. Om Prakash: | What happened was that I became a teacher in the same school where I graduated, from and one of my duties as a teacher was to counsel the local children because I knew them and grew up in that area. The headmaster asked me to start counseling them, so I started reading books on counseling, and that was the first time in my life where I helped children to learn what was appropriate and acceptable behavior in certain situations. So, that was my first experience how to help others in my earlier days. I taught in a high school, mathematics and physics, for about eight years to support my education while I lived at home, so that was the reason why I got interested in the counseling.
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| Seth Greene: | You got interested in counseling, and where did you go to graduate school?
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| Dr. Om Prakash: | This involves the story of my transformation. I wanted to become an engineer because I knew that India will need a lot of engineers when freedom came.
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| So I had a transformation, and I need to tell you about that. I was involved in the freedom movement and at the end of the movement, I was imprisoned as a political prisoner by the British because I was a troublemaker for them.
During the prison time, I had a chance to think about my future. I knew all the people who later became important in the political circles. I had their trust, for the movement, and I liked helping people because of my background in helping children had transformed into helping people. I did not like the poisonous nature of politics and gave my political ambitions in favor of helping others. This was a transforming event my life and guides and inspires to this day.
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| At that time, I changed my major from engineering to psychology, and I did a master’s degree from a university in India. I tried to enroll for a Ph.D. program at the University of Delhi, but my supervisor said, “Om, if you want to learn psychology, you have to go to the United States.” She recommended me to the University of Minnesota, that’s where I came to study psychology herself, and that’s how I ended up in this country.
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| Seth Greene: | After you graduated, what did you do then?
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| Dr. Om Prakash: | After I graduated, the first job I had was at the Austin State School for developmentally disabled persons. I worked there for about eighteen months, and we stayed in Austin for a time. That was the start of my career. |
| Then I had the opportunity to move up my profession and become a director of behavioral therapy in North Texas State Hospital, so we moved to Wichita Falls and stayed there for about ten years. Our son was born, when I was training in Kansas for my internship, and he was getting ready to graduate from elementary school. My wife said we’ve got to find better schools for him, so I called up one of my friends in Dallas and asked if there is an opportunity for me to move to Dallas. He called me back the next day and asked me would I be interested in working with a physician who was going to build his clinic, and wants to have a psychologist as a part of his clinic. I said yes. sure, I will. Next day I called up the physician. He said, “come on over, we need to talk,” and I drove to Dallas from Wichita Falls which is about 150 miles from Dallas, and we had an understanding. That was 1983 when we moved to Dallas, and I have been in private practice of clinical psychology for the last almost-thirty-five years.
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| Seth Greene: | Has that been the same practice the entire time?
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| Dr. Om Prakash: | Of course, I had two jobs. One was in Austin State School and the other one was at the North Texas State Hospital, but apart from that, for the last thirty-five years I have been in private practice.
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| About 15 years ago, I trained for two years as a mentor coach, and I added coaching services to my practice. I have been providing coaching services for about 15 years and clinical psychology for about thirty-five years. | |
| Seth Greene: | What did you wish you knew when you started that you know now?
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| Dr. Om Prakash: | When I learned that connecting to your patients and coming in touch with their feelings is the key to helping them. I also learned that life happens in the present. The past is dead, there’s nothing you can do about it. The future – we don’t know what’s going to happen, so connecting with the present is the key to helping people.
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| If there are issues in the past that have not been resolved, we pick up the these issues from the past, move them on to the present, and try to help the person to deal with them in the present because the past is dead and gone, all we can do is to deal with when life happens. There are three words that I describe the past with: honor it, learn from it, and let go of it. Living in the past will make you depressed because most of the time when we are doing okay, we never think of the past. We think of the past only when things are not going okay. And what part of the past would you be thinking? Most of the time, the bad part. And how would it make you feel? It will make you feel bad and you will feel depressed.
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| This is what I learned over a period –of- time, and then the question still remains, ‘how do you help your patients and clients to remain in touch with the present? For that, I teach them mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness is present moment awareness, because as life happens in the present, connecting the present will help you to deal with the issues much more effectively.
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| A lot of people are going through life like zombies, and they are not aware of what is going on in their life. So, creating that present moment awareness with the practice of meditation helps them to deal with the issues as they are occurring.
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| I also use hypnosis in my work. Hypnosis is a state of intense inner awareness which allows a person to be able to go back to the issues that are still unresolved. We lift those issues and bring them to the present. This technique is called, The Affect Bridge. I use this technique only when the issues continue to disturb a person’s present behavior, so that we can deal with the issues but we don’t have dwell on the past.
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| The future is uncertain, we don’t know what’s going to happen a minute from now, so you try to project as far as you can go. Because there are two types of people who stumble in life: those who look too far away and those who look too close. Project to the future far enough because that’s all the future you need. We make plans, but they don’t always come through. We have control over how we deal with life – we can respond or react to life. Life happens, it’s an open book and we need to train or teach our clients and patients how to deal with life by responding rather reacting to what happens to us.
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Every time we react to situations emotionally, we make mistakes. If you learn to create present moment awar Comments In Channel  Download from Google Play  Download from App Store  United States00:00 00:00 x   Prakash Interviewed Once AgainOm Prakash, Ph.D |
