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You gain a lot of benefits by talking to yourself in certain ways. Why do you suppose that is? What is going on? One intriguing theory is that the two separate brain hemispheres in your head function like two different personalities, and they can influence each other.

This is what we know: The top layer of your brain has two sides, called hemispheres, and they function differently. Your left hemisphere, for example, deals with language. Your right hemisphere deals with emotions (I’m oversimplifying here so we can talk about it briefly).

Research has shown if the left hemisphere of a man’s brain is destroyed by a war injury or stroke, he is unable to speak. He can feel. He knows what he wants to say, but he doesn’t have the brain machinery to put it into words.

If his right hemisphere is destroyed, on the other hand, but his left hemisphere is still intact, he is capable of putting things into words, but he speaks in a monotone: there is no feeling or emotional expression in what he says.

That is a basic understanding of the brain hemispheres. One side deals with language, reason and logic. The other side processes emotion (the brains of women are less compartmentalized than mens’ but these basic divisions of hemispheric strengths still hold).

Now, if we can extrapolate, we come up with a helpful understanding. The right hemisphere contains emotions, including worries, fears, irrational depressions, and hurt feelings, and if you aren’t talking to yourself, that’s all there is: A dumb (mute) emotional person.

When things are going well, that’s great. Emotional feelings of love and happiness are the height of life. But when things are going badly, when you feel negative emotion, it is unpleasant and sometimes difficult to act in your own best interests.

One of the things I’ve noticed many times is that when I feel afraid or depressed, my thoughts are a response to my feelings. I feel worried, so my thoughts, quite automatically, contain worried images and words. But when I deliberately take over my thoughts and think what I want to think — not at the effect of my feelings, but like a responsible adult talking to an hysterical child — I have noticed my thoughts can influence my feelings just as much as my feelings influence my thoughts.

So I might say to myself, “Hey wait a minute. It isn’t that big of a deal. Even if it turns out badly, it’s not a catastrophe. I can do this.” This simple, rational self-talk usually calms me down. It makes me saner. More logical. More rational. And my feelings become less negative.

If you’ve never tried this, I’m sure it must sound too easy. An effective solution can’t possibly be that simple. And in a way, that’s true. There is a trick to it. Sometimes you have to be firm, as you might with a child throwing a fit. But it doesn’t take practice and it isn’t difficult. All you have to do is start talking sense to yourself.

Think about it this way: you’ve got two brains. Your right brain is the source of vague worries and fears, which show up as images rather than words (imagery is more associated with the right hemisphere). Normally, your left brain picks up the emotional tone and starts adding words like a narrator of a documentary film. Your words embellish the feelings, heightening them and prolonging them. If you aren’t paying attention, if you’re just going along with it, you can sink into a lousy state in no time at all.

But just turn on your language and see what happens. Take your brain off automatic pilot and start thinking what you want to think — say to yourself what you want to have going through you mind. Say sane, reasonable, calm, effective things to yourself, and watch what happens. Your right brain calms down. You calm down.

Stop playing the narrator and start directing the film. This is where slotras can come in and save the day. You’ve practiced them already (when you didn’t need them), and now that you could really use some sane thoughts, you have them ready made.

Be a cause rather than an effect of your emotional state. When your feelings are negative, they will naturally alter what you’re thinking. You’ll automatically think negatively in response to the feelings. But you can turn it around. Think calming thoughts deliberately and your feelings will automatically change in response to your self-talk.

In the book, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, you can read the fascinating true story of a whaling ship that was deliberately sunk by a whale.

After the ship sunk, the men in the small boats were left adrift in the middle of the ocean. The three boats were eventually seperated, and one of the boats was captained by Owen Chase. He gave his men coaching in how to think about their circumstances. “I reasoned with them,” Chase was later to say, “and told them that we would not die sooner by keeping our hopes.”

They had already seen one of their men, Richard Peterson, die, and they saw that the loss of hope is basically what killed him. Almost as soon as he gave up, he died.

Owen Chase came up with all kinds of arguments and thoughts that would help them stay determined to keep trying and not give up, to keep them from sinking into hopelessness and despair. What he was doing was teaching them how to think about their circumstances — teaching them to think calmly and rationally about their circumstances so their negative feelings didn’t take over their thoughts and send them to the bottom of the ocean. And it worked.

Another good illustration from the book is about what happens when someone feels determined and motivated. At one point in their amazing journey in the whaleboats, they were totally laid out, down and out, they could hardly move. They were thirsty and hungry and starved and feeling hopeless.

But someone sighted land and all of them at once came alive! They were up and moving and shouting. These were people who were almost dead a few moments ago.

Why? Hopelessness and helplessness suck out the soul, leaving but the shales and husks of men. But the possibility of success creates energy and determination.

Consider this: Whether you think something is possible or not is largely in your head, and since confidence in the possibility of success makes such an enormous difference, it is vitally crucial that you learn to think in a way that keeps your confidence alive. It is crucial that you think in a way that keeps you determined and motivated.

Your mental habits are the things to master. What electrified the men was the thought that they might make it. But think about it: They weren’t on land yet. There might not have been any fresh water there. But moments before, most of them were harboring doubt that they would ever make it home alive. That thought is debilitating — maybe as debilitating as severe dehydration or starvation.

You’ve got to learn to coach yourself toward confidence and determination and motivation. And coach yourself using slotras — pithy phrases that encapsulate a message.

I don’t know about you, but when I first heard about using “positive self-talk” to improve my performance, it didn’t strike me as particularly earthshaking. It seems like common sense, doesn’t it? Obviously, if you talk to yourself in a confident, reassuring, positive way, you will probably perform most tasks better.

But then it occurred to me in mid-scoff that, as obvious as this seems, I didn’t do it. I did not deliberately talk to myself in a confident, reassuring, positive way in order to improve my performance.

So I decided to try it on public speaking, a task I was learning to do at the time. Here’s what I found: When I thought about an upcoming speech, I’d get a jolt of adrenaline, and that jolt triggered my mind to start thinking a stream of anxious thoughts: “I should have picked a better topic. They aren’t going to like it. Maybe I can get out of it somehow.” This was a stream of not only anxious thoughts, but anxiety-provoking thoughts — they made me feel more nervous.

And these thoughts were automatic. I didn’t try to think these things. They just seemed to happen all by themselves. In fact I tried not to think them.

I also found it very easy to take over my own thought-stream. I just interrupted and started talking: “Wait a minute, hold on one minute. It is a good subject to talk about, and at least some of the people in the audience will be interested. It’s going to be okay. I’ll do fine. I’ll prepare well and when I get up there, I’ll just relax and have a good time.” This made me feel calmer.

I eventually created a slotra that worked better than anything, and I’ve already told you about it: “I will make them get how important this is.”

It’s easy to take over your thoughts and think whatever you want to think. You might not do it naturally, but it is easy.

It is like breathing — when people feel stressed, their breathing automatically becomes shallow and high in the chest, and this way of breathing makes them feel more stressed. But once they become aware of it, they can very easily take over their breathing and breathe any way they like.

Self-coaching works the same way. Yes, there may be an automatic thinking style your brain uses when you feel anxious (or any other negative emotion), but you can very easily take over and do it the way you like any time you want. All you need is to be aware of the possibility.

This is good news. It works very well and it is easy to do.

When you want to improve your performance on some task, every time you think about the task, talk to yourself in a confident, reassuring, positive way — especially right before the task. You’ll feel better and you’ll do better.

And any time you are feeling a negative emotion, deliberately begin talking to yourself calmly, rationally, and logically and your feelings will change in response. Think of it as your left, verbal hemisphere talking to your more emotional right hemisphere.

If it is a situation that repeats itself, you can create and practice good slotras just for those situations.

Your state of mind when doing some things is very important. Before sending their salespeople out to cold canvass, sales managers often talk to their people, pumping them up — trying to get them in the right frame of mind before they start.

Canvassing, or cold calling, is going out to sell someone something without an appointment. Starting cold. Just walking in, or knocking on their door uninvited, and trying to sell them. You know how much you dislike being on the receiving end, so you can imagine how difficult the job is and how high the rejection level might be. Sometimes it is worse than rejection. Sometimes it is hostility.

The sales manager doesn’t do anything astonishing to get her salespeople in the right frame of mind. She reminds them of some basic fundamentals: Rejection is part of the process, this is a numbers game, our product is the best they can get at the best price, your job is to turn them on to something good, persistence is the key, and if you are successful, the rewards are high.

By reminding salespaople of these fundamentals right before they go do it, their chances of doing well are greater.

Your frame of mind — what is going through your mind — when you do something, and especially when you begin something, has a large influence on how successfully you do it.

With some deliberate effort, you can get yourself in the right frame of mind before doing something, and slotras can help tremendously.

Read next: Repetition Sucks

Tags: slotrology by Adam Khan
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When you concentrate on one slotra until you accomplish the change you want and then stop repeating your slotra, sometimes you’ll regress back to your old way of thinking, and the change you accomplished will fade away.

This is not a failure. Please remember this. It is only a regression to old habits. Simply start using the slotra again. The change will come back.

This time, however, keep repeating the slotra even after the change is accomplished again, for awhile at least, just to make sure the new mental habit has completely taken hold.

After repeating the slotra for awhile, it will start to come into your mind automatically when you need it. You have successfully changed the way you think, which will change the way you feel and act, which will change the results you get.

This is a crucially important point. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people try something, and it works — it improves their lives just as they hoped it would, so they no longer feel they have to worry about it because everything is great, so they stop doing the things that made everything great, which causes things to go back to the way they used to be, and then they conclude, “It didn’t work!”

It would be like starting an exercise program and losing fifty pounds and feeling great, and then no longer feeling like you need to exercise because you’ve been slim now for awhile, so you stop exercising. And then you gain weight. But then the kicker: You conclude exercise programs don’t work.

Obviously you wouldn’t make that mistake with something as obvious as exercise, but you could very easily do it with something as invisible as thought-habits, so I am giving you a clear warning which you would do well to heed: Don’t make that mistake.

If you find yourself reverting to an old habit, it is because you stopped doing something. Start doing what was working before and you will regain your lost benefits.

Read next: Talking To Yourself For Fun And Profit

Tags: slotrology by Adam Khan
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Houdini loved magic tricks from the time he was a boy, and spent a huge portion of his time learning to amaze people. It was tremendously fun for him. As he started to perform, he didn’t make much money. It’s a difficult business to succeed at. But he eventually did succeed. He had a motivation he could not forget: The vow he made when he was young to his dying father to financially support his mother for the rest of her life.

He worked unbelievably hard to keep that vow. It was a powerful motivation. His mind was on his purpose every minute of the day.

Consider the patience, persistence, and commitment required to learn just one skill: The ability to swallow something only halfway to the stomach and hold it there, and be able to bring it up again to your mouth. A Japanese performer showed Houdini the trick, and it took Houdini hundreds of hours of practice to master it, but it enabled him to do his most famous stunts.

He would “swallow” lock-picking tools, but nobody knew this. He dared the finest jails to search him head to toe and lock him up. When he was all locked up, he brought his tools out and escaped from the jail — sometimes making it to the front gate before the jailers did!

Why did he try so hard and work so diligently? Because he had a good reason.

Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

Think about your own why. With a good enough reason, you can easily and even joyously bear with any suffering, hardship, difficulty, or tediousness that your goal requires.

And as you’re thinking, your mind will be electrified with earnest intention and will generate ideas. Eric Hoffer wrote, “We are told that talent creates its own opportunities, but it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.”

But thinking about a purpose is only what to do with your mind when it is idle and when you can’t actually work on your purpose. Or what to do when you feel demoralized by setbacks. Re-ignite your motivation by thinking about the reason you really want to accomplish your goal. Make those motivations into slotras (thoughts you practice thinking), and practice thinking them every day.

And thinking about your goals is not the same as talking about them. I tend to agree with Earl Nightingale, who certainly knew something about accomplishment. He said:

I’ve always felt that glibness is a serious danger to accomplishment. Like a steam valve, if we talk at great length about what we are going to do, we seem to lose just that much steam when it comes to actually doing it.

Make statements about what you will do. This is not only positive, it is future-oriented, so it will bring you up, and it focuses your mind on a definite purposeful action.

Read next: When You Backslide

Tags: slotrology by Adam Khan
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Your slotra can be a statement of fact, an idea, a question, or a clear statement of purpose. The effort of trying to create a slotra is itself useful — especially when you’re creating a statement of purpose slotra. It will help you clarify your goals. Whatever the task, work out a simple phrase that expresses your purpose. And keep working with it and refining it until you get it down to a simple, clear phrase.

For example, a waiter tries to work it out. “I am supposed to take the order and bring the food and drinks.” That’s only a start. Yes, he’s supposed to do those things, but part of his job is his attitude. He could add, “with a good attitude,” but it doesn’t quite encompass the whole thing, because what about special requests? What about going beyond the call of duty?

He works with it and finally comes up with: “Help them have a good time.” This encompasses everything. It helps them have a good time if he takes their order — and helps even more if he takes their order when they want it taken. And it helps them have a good time if he brings their food and drink to them — especially if he brings it right after it was made.

And all the little things he does is part of his purpose, beautifully and simply expressed in the phrase, “Help them have a good time.” And it’s a phrase short enough it can zip through his mind quickly while he’s working.

And that’s why you want your slotras short and sweet. Most tasks require some of your RAM, some of your mental attention, hopefully quite a bit. So if you try to think about your slotra and it is long and difficult to remember, your effort to remember will interfere with what you’re trying to do.

Practice saying your statement of purpose when you’re not doing anything important. Repeat it to yourself often. And then when you’re actively engaged in a task, think about it once in awhile and make sure you stay on purpose. It’ll make your work more efficient. It’ll make you more effective. It’ll keep you from being sidetracked.

After repeating your purpose for awhile, the thought will come to you when you need it most. Automatically. When it does, heed it.

“One of the most dangerous forms of human error,” wrote Paul Nitze, “is forgetting what one is trying to achieve.”

No matter where you are or what you’re doing, this is true: The best use of an idle mind is thinking about a purpose. When your mind is cut loose of needing to think about something, it’ll tend to eventually think about something unpleasant. There are at least two good reasons for this: First,l negative stuff is more compelling that positive stuff. I mean, how often do you see a crowd gather when a person helps an old lady across the street? But if the old lady gets run over by a bus? Well, then you’d get a crowd.

This is not a criticism of the human race. Not at all. It is not a comment on how low we have sunk. It is nothing like that. We are animals. We have evolved to survive. And part of that is that we have evolved to be acutely aware of danger. Dangerous information turns all our senses on high and compels our attention, even against our will.

Because of that, worries are more compelling that the thought of something nice that might happen, so as your mind wanders around, it won’t stick as often on a nice thought as it will on a scary thought.

But the second reason an aimless mind will gravitate toward negativity is that there are more negative possibilities that positive, so just by the numbers alone, the chances are, even if it was random, that your mind would think about more negative stuff than positive.

What do I mean there are more negative possibilities? Well, think about health, for example. A positive possibility is that you will be in good health, and for that to be, your spleen has to be functioning right, your knees need to be painless, your teeth need to be cavity-free, and so on. Any one thing wrong and you are not in good health or feeling good. How many negative possibilities are there? As many as the number of things that can go wrong with the human body.

But when you think of good health, it’s all one thing, usually. You don’t think, “Boy I feel good today. My liver feels good, and my shins feel good. Even my eyelids are doing great!” It’s all one thing, and so there’s not much to think about, except all the million things that could go wrong.

And another reason your mind will be more likely to think negatively when it’s idle is that negative things like pain compel you to pay attention. In other words, when your elbow hurts, you notice it. You can’t help it. The pain draws your attention. But when your elbow is feeling fine, what is there to notice? What would alert your attention to your fine-feeling elbow? Chances are your elbows have felt fine all day. But until I mentioned it, did you give even one little thought to your elbows today?

An idle mind is like a warm damp place where unhappy thoughts and feelings, like bacteria, grow and multiply.

How do you stop your mind from being idle? The best use of an idle mind is thinking about a purpose. If you’re actively working on a purpose, there’s nothing to worry about, because the purpose and the task at hand will organize your mind and keep your attention too occupied to worry.

But when you’re not actively working, when you’re driving somewhere or waiting in line or taking a shower or lying in bed waiting for sleep, that’s when to start thinking about a purpose of yours.

If you have an overriding goal, that’s the one to choose. Think about how you’re going to get it done. Think about the advantages of accomplishing it. Think about why you want to accomplish it, and think up new reasons. Think about better and more efficient ways of accomplishing the goal. Ponder the goal. Mull it over purposefully. And if you can think of nothing else, use your goal as a slotra and repeat it over and over. This itself, you will notice, brings up new ideas that can help you.

And when you are thinking up good reasons why you want to accomplish this goal and thinking up the advantages you will gain from its accomplishment, make those into slotras. Repeat the advantages to yourself.

You can accomplish things without being motivated: Simply make a promise and make sure you keep it. But it’s more fun to accomplish things when you’re motivated. And fun is worth a lot.

One of the best things to focus on when you are driving your car or taking a shower and your mind is wandering aimlessly, is why you are doing what you’re doing. Why do you want to accomplish your goal? What will it do for you, for your family, for the world at large? And what else? And what else?

It seems strange, but sometimes people set a goal for very good reasons, and then get so busy pursuing it, they actually forget the reasons. And then the task starts feeling like you’re just going through the motions. It feels like you have to do what you’re doing. It’s not fun any more.

What’s the solution for this? Keep yourself aware of your motivations by making slotras and practicing thinking them.

Create slotras of your purposes and motivations, and practice thinking those thoughts when your mind is idle. This will keep your mind focused on what you want and prevent negativity from invading your mind. And the process of coming up with good slotras can help you clarify your purposes so you have a better idea of what you want to accomplish.

Read next: The Magic Of Motivation

Tags: slotrology by Adam Khan
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