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Around the time I was learning to use slotrology in promoting my book, my teenage son was looking for a job. I was telling him about slotralogy, and he used it. And instead of just getting the first job he could find, I suggested he first think about what his ideal job would be, and aim for that, and then use slotras to give himself confidence in the interviews.

A short while later, he told me he’d used slotrology and landed the perfect job — at Victoria’s Secret! He was the only male who worked there (he worked in the stock room), and I don’t think he’s ever enjoyed a job more.

You can use slotras to give you confidence or any emotion you think would be helpful. You can also use straightforward instructions as slotras. Michael Johnson, the gold medal Olympian and the fastest man in the world at the time I’m writing this, coaches himself before every race. He uses slotrology, saying things like this to himself: “Stay low. Ease up at the turn.” He practices thinking these things so they come to mind before and during a race. His slotras are instructions and reminders, which is good stuff to think at the right time. He tells himself the best way to run the race, or the particular things he’s working on.

If you’ve ever wondered what’s going through their heads when great athletes are getting ready for an event, now you know what one of them does. And you can use the same method.

Do you have a challenging event coming up soon? Think about what instructions you’d like running through your head right before and during that event. Write out a list of ideas. Pick the best one or two, and shorten them into brief statements.

Now practice thinking those slotras. Practice. Write them on a card and keep the card with you. Two or three times a day, pull out your card. Practice saying those statements to yourself twenty times each while thinking about the upcoming event. Imagine being at the event and thinking those thoughts.

You’re not doing this as some sort of magical incantation, and you’re not doing it to “influence your subconscious mind.” You’re simply trying to practice. You’re making those particular thoughts familiar and easy to think.

So instructions can work well as slotras. Motivational statements work well too. PantsKicker.com is for people with an important and challenging purpose, so motivation is an important issue. People with easy, unchallenging goals don’t need much motivation or determination. But you’ve got something big to accomplish, don’t you? And it’s important to you. So making sure you stay motivated is vital.

To make a motivational slotra, ask yourself these questions: What thoughts put the fight in you? What thoughts make you want to try harder? What thoughts fire you up?

When I started promoting my first book and I ran into setbacks and started to feel discouraged, I used to say to myself, “The world needs this!” It made me feel determined and motivated.

Use whatever works.

Practicing those thoughts is really the key. You can have brilliant insights galore, but if those insights don’t occur to you at the time you actually need them, they aren’t worth much.

Think about it. How many times have you gotten a new understanding, but when the time came to put your insight into action, you thought and acted the same way you always have? Why do you suppose that happens? It happens because your new understanding didn’t transfer to where you needed it. You didn’t remember to think the new thoughts (your new insights) when you needed to think them.

You have already-existing thought habits, and that’s what will go through your mind until you create some new thought habits.

How do you create new thought habits? The most basic and simple way is to simply practice new thoughts until they come to mind naturally. In other words, repeat a slotra again and again, just as you would practice a new phrase in a foreign language until it is comfortable and familiar, until it comes to mind easily and naturally.

Another advantage of repeating your slotra every day is that it keeps the new thought fresh in your mind, which means it’ll be right there when the right situation arises. Having your new insight freshly in mind makes it much easier to think that thought at the right time, every time. Do that a few times and what was once a startling new insight will become just the way you think naturally.

Read next: How To Change Your Habits Of Thought

Tags: slotrology by Adam Khan
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You think the way you think because that’s the way you learned to think. You look at things the way you’re used to — the way you’ve learned over your lifetime to look at things. It seems to you that any sensible person would see things the way you see them. You interpret events in a way that seems natural to you.

But why does it “seem natural?” A person from a different culture might interpret the same event very differently. And not because they are ignorant and you are all-knowing. Someone who knows far more than you may indeed interpret the event very differently than you do.

Okay, okay. You get it. You may be surprised to find some very good news embedded in this fact, however, because it means if you practice thinking a different way, that new way of thinking could become natural.

For example, when I first started giving public speeches to promote my book, people weren’t listening the way I wanted them to listen. They were listening casually, as if they were watching something interesting on television. But it was an important subject that could have an enormous impact on the rest of their lives.

My natural way of thinking about their lack of seriousness about the topic was demoralizing: “People don’t care, I’ll never be a good speaker, etc.”

But I came up with a new way of thinking about it. I said to myself, “I’m going to make them get how important this is!”

I tried many different statements, but that one made me the feel most motivated.

Once I came up with this new statement, did I think it automatically from then on? No. Not a chance. If I hadn’t made a deliberate effort to say that statement to myself whenever I thought about speaking, it would have faded away, and my insight would have vanished into a vague memory. It wouldn’t have changed a thing.

So I said the statement to myself many times. I wrote it down and carried the piece of paper around with me to remind me to practice, and I got in the habit of saying it to myself whenever I thought about an upcoming speech (and as the speech got closer, that was several times a day). I would imagine being in front of the audience and I would say to myself with feeling, “I will make them get how important this is!” I imagined the phrase coming into my mind during my speech.

After awhile, it became natural to think that way.

So that’s the tool we’re going to explore: To practice thinking something until it becomes natural.

This is probably the most basic mental tool in existence. When you want to change the way you see things, when you want to change the way you feel about something, when you want to treat people differently or persist more on your goals or eat less at the dinner table, this mental tool is the most basic and the most practical.

It’s like a knife. A knife is a very simple tool. It is about as basic as tools get. The design hasn’t changed much in thousands of years, and yet with all our technology and scientific advancement, today in the 21st century when you want to slice a tomato, you probably use a simple knife.

But as ancient and basic as this mental tool is, I don’t really have a good name for it. It’s not exactly a slogan or a motto or a mantra or a saying or a proverb or an affirmation, but it’s kind of like all of those. So I’m going to coin a word just so we have something to call it. Sorry about doing this, but it has to be done.

I’m going to call it a “slotra.” Think of it as a cross between a slogan, which is a phrase used in advertising or politics, and a mantra, which is a word or sound repeated over and over in meditation. But a slotra is neither of those.

A slotra is a phrase or statement you say to yourself many times so the phrase or statement becomes comfortable and familiar and you get good at thinking it. You repeat it often enough or long enough that eventually the statement comes into your mind on its own and when it’s appropriate.

A slotra is a thought you are learning to think. You repeat it the same way and for the same reason you repeat foreign language phrases when you’re trying to learn a different language.

When you want to travel to Germany, certain phrases will be handy, so you learn them. And you don’t just say a phrase once and then expect your brain to remember it when you need it. You say it again and again until it becomes comfortable and familiar. You practice saying it so it will come to mind easily when you need it.

That’s exactly what you’re doing with slotras.

Each word of a new language feels clumsy to say at first, and you find it hard to pronounce and hard to remember. But the more you say it, the more you repeat it, the more natural it feels.

That’s the purpose of “slotralogy” — to make helpful thoughts come to mind when you need them. The new thoughts may feel clumsy and awkward to think at first. But you keep practicing, and after awhile they feel more natural.

Many different kinds of thoughts can be slotras. For example, you can take a reframe and turn it into a slotra. You can take an insight you’ve had, encapsulate the insight into a short statement, and then say that statement to yourself several times a day for a month. The insight will become familiar and come to mind easily. You’ve turned your insight into a slotra.

You can make a goal or purpose into a slotra. That’s a good one. It keeps your mind focused. That’s what I did with my slotra, “I will make them get how important this is.” It’s a purpose. That thought, going through my mind, focused my attention on a purpose — a purpose that helped me communicate with more vigor and intensity.

Another good form of slotra is a rule. We’ll get into this later.

The most useful slotras make you feel a certain emotion, like confidence or motivation or determination. The best slotras I have made were created by starting with the emotion I wanted. First I thought about what I wanted to feel in a certain situation.

For example, right after I published my first book, I went around visiting bookstores and asking them to carry my book. I felt nervous and a little awkward when I was introducing myself to the manager, and I didn’t like feeling that way, so I thought about what I would like to feel in that situation. I wanted to enjoy it and have fun with it. I wanted to feel relaxed and at ease.

So first decide what you want to feel. The next step is to create a statement that helps you feel that way, that directs your attention in a way that results in the feeling you want. I came up with this one: I’m going to have fun with this. Whenever I thought about going into bookstores, I said that phrase and imagined having fun. And as I walked into a bookstore, I made sure that’s what going through my mind. And it worked. I did have fun.

You can consider that a two-step formula for creating a slotra:

1. Decide what emotion you want to feel in a particular situation
2. Come up with a phrase or statement that makes you feel that way in that situation

A slotra is a kind of on-the-run motivator. It’s a focuser. A confidence-builder. An anti-negativity shield. It’s a mental tool. It gets your mind to work for you instead of against you.

When I first started promoting my book to bookstores, I would call up a store to get their fax number, the name of the buyer, etc. Most of the time people on the phone were very cooperative and helpful and friendly. But once in awhile, someone would be suspicious and uncooperative. I became downhearted after these calls and didn’t want to do any more.

The negative calls really stuck out in my mind, of course, because of the brain’s negative bias. The thoughts going through my head were something like this: “What am I doing this for? I’ll never make it. With people like that out there, nobody is going to want my book. They think I’m a pushy salesman. They aren’t going to want to listen to me…”

This stream of automatic thoughts made me feel bad. But I talked some sense into myself. “The next time I have a negative person on the line,” I told myself, “I’ll turn them around. I’ll make them like me. They won’t be able to resist my charm…”

That last line really struck me as funny, and made me feel strong. It put me in a good mood, so I used it as a slotra. “They won’t be able to resist my charm.” I said it many times for practice, and when I got on the phone, I deliberately said it to myself, and it worked great. It put me in just the right mood.

I also used “I’ll turn it around” quite a bit too. When I felt worried that the next person I called was going to be negative, I kept saying to myself, “It doesn’t matter. I’ll just turn it around!” The slotra changed my focus from a fear things would go wrong to what I could do about it if it did. The slotra gave me confidence and helped me relax and I actually was able to turn it around when I talked to a negative person — because I was in the right mood.

I practiced the phrases many times, and when the right circumstances came up, those phrases naturally came to mind. They became the content of my mind. They became a natural part of my stream of consciousness. And they helped me get the job done a lot better than the overly negative and emotional thought-stream I originally had.

For the next few articles, we’re going to explore slotrology: What it is, what it isn’t, and how you can use it to help you increase your persistence, strengthen your determination, and restore your lost motivation.

Read next: Slotrology 201

Tags: slotrology by Adam Khan
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Halfway through J.K. Rowling’s latest book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7), Harry and his two friends are on the run. They’re trying to find the evil lord’s “Horcruxes,” which are objects containing part of his soul. They need to destroy them. They’ve found one but haven’t figured out how to destroy it. They don’t know where to look for the others. They’re having a hard time.

Then Harry’s best friend (Ron) gets mad and leaves them. This is a setback. And what does a setback do? It makes you feel demoralized. And when you feel demoralized, your mind starts making mistakes, and those mistakes make you even more demoralized. Here’s a passage from the book that perfectly illustrates it. This is what Harry is thinking:

He could not hide it from himself: Ron had been right. Dumbledore had left him with virtually nothing. They had discovered one Horcrux, but they had no means of destroying it: The others were as unattainable as they had ever been. Hopelessness threatened to engulf him. He was staggered now to think of his own presumption in accepting his friends’ offers to accompany him on this meandering, pointless journey. He knew nothing, he had no ideas, and he was constantly, painfully on the alert for any indication that Hermione too was about to tell him that she had had enough, that she was leaving.

In his depression, Harry exaggerates: He had no ideas, he knew nothing. This wasn’t true. But can you see how feeling demoralized makes those kinds of thoughts easier to think? And how thinking those thoughts would make him feel even more discouraged?

Hopelessness “threatened to engulf him,” but this was false hopelessness. There was still plenty he could do. Thinking of his situation as hopeless took the fight out of him, as it would for anyone. He desperately needed to use the antivirus for the mind and straighten out his thinking.

Okay, let’s look at one more thought-mistake Harry is making and then we’ll leave the poor kid alone. He calls their mission a “meandering, pointless journey.” This is the mistake of harmful judging. In fact, their journey is vitally important and he is the only one who has a chance of succeeding with it. Yes, he may fail. But if he succeeds, he may save thousands of lives, maybe millions. But harmful judging doesn’t help. It only makes him feel demoralized and unmotivated.

His depression also influences his perception, as it does for you and me. He begins to feel hypersensitive about how Hermione feels, maybe misinterpreting some of the expressions on her face and things she says. And you know what that’s like, don’t you? Everyone has done it. Misinterpretations can easily make negative predictions come true. Harry might accuse Hermione of thinking something she’s not really thinking, making her mad. And now she is thinking that.

The point of all this is to let you see it from the outside. I thought J.K. Rowling did a great job of conveying the feeling of demoralization and the kind of thought-mistakes that accompany and intensify that feeling.

And my other purpose is for you to realize you should waste no time when you feel disheartened. Don’t let yourself spin down into a dive. Run — don’t walk — to the nearest paper and pen and start using the antivirus for your mind. Undemoralize yourself as soon as possible. You don’t want any of those thought-mistakes to solidify into beliefs — the kind of beliefs that would hold you back from goals you want to reach.

Clean out your mind and your motivation will return. The antivirus for your mind works like magic to get you back on your feet, striving toward your goal with determination and vigor.

Tags: examples by Adam Khan
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When you feel discouraged, you know what to do: The antivirus for your mind. When you’re looking for why you think your setback has happened, you’ll look for mistakes in your explanations. So far so good.

Sometimes the explanation you came up with will be true, but the implication is false (or at least could be better). This falls under the category of false implication (one of the 22 virus definitions). False implication is a thought-mistake.

For example, a woman was depressed because she’d lost her job two years ago, and hadn’t gotten another job since. She felt like a failure because she was still jobless after all this time.

Her explanation of her failure was: She didn’t do well in job interviews.

Her therapist wanted to test this, so he did a mock interview with her, and the therapist agreed — she was terrible at being interviewed.

However, her conclusion was that because she interviewed so badly, she would never get a job. The therapist, on the other hand, concluded that since they now knew exactly what the problem was, getting a job has become possible. All she had to do was learn to interview well.

So they practiced and the therapist coached her to improve the way she presented herself and she got better. They rehearsed, did mockups, recorded the practice sessions and really worked on it.

At her very next interview, she was offered the job. That was ten years ago. She has been continually employed since then in a very competitive field.

Now look at what happened. Her explanation for her failure was correct. She made no thought-mistakes there. She thought she was a lousy interview, and she was. But she made a mistake in the implication she drew from that. She thought the fact that she wasn’t good at interviewing implied she couldn’t get hired. This implication is wrong, or at least you could draw a more productive implication from the same fact.

So when you’re going through the process, writing down your demoralizing thoughts and checking them for thought-mistakes, go one step further. If you find a demoralizing thought and you know it’s true, explore further. What demoralizing implications have you concluded about it? Are they necessarily true? Don’t be so sure. If a thought is pessimistic, it is suspect. Any negative thought you have is automatically suspect. Really look at it because the consequences are significant.

Tags: examples by Adam Khan
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