Thought Mastery Main

 

Hello, this is AJ Hoge. Welcome to the next lesson. Today we’re going to talk about

“Thought Mastery.” And what thought mastery is, it’s controlling and managing your thoughts. And when you control your thoughts, when you manage your thoughts, when you can change and shift your thoughts, you change and shift your motivation. You change and shift your emotion. And that causes you to change and shift your actions.

And a lot of what we’re going to talk about today comes from NLP. That’s neuro‑linguistic programming which is a very long word. Neuro means nerve or brain, something to do with the nerves or the brain or the nervous system, neuro. Linguistic we’ve learned already.

Linguistic means language. And programming, of course, is similar to programming a computer, telling it something, what to do. So what it talks about is how to program your brain with language and with thoughts and with pictures. That’s neuro‑linguistic programming. It was developed by several different people, one of the most famous people is Richard Bandler developed this system called NLP. And NLP is designed to help you kind of control your brain a little better. To decide the kind of images, decide the kind of thoughts you want to have in your brain. And by doing that, by changing your thoughts you will change your emotions and your actions.

One of the key techniques of NLP is to take images that you have in your brain and to modify them and change them. So a lot of times we have negative pictures in our head and we don’t realize how powerful they are, how much they affect us, how they change the way we act, how they change the way we feel. And so what we want to do is look at the pictures that we make in our head and we want to choose them. We want to change them and choose better pictures. 

Let me give you an example. Let’s talk about English class, English class. Imagine in your head an English class. What do you see? What picture comes into your head when I say English class? For example, do you see a room with a lot of students in it? Are they sitting at little desks in rows? Are they moving a lot or are they still? What about the teacher? Where is the teacher? Is the teacher at the front of the class standing above the students talking down to them? Do the students look happy? Are they smiling or do they look bored? What about the quality of this picture in your head? Is it bright and sunny and colorful? Or is it kind of dark, maybe black and white? Is it loud? Is there music or is it quiet? Or is it silent? Is it big and in your face, close to you, or small and far away?

All of these qualities of the picture will change your emotional feeling. So, for example, if we take this picture and we imagine this class, this is the image I have in my head when I think English class, and you know, it’s not a very positive one. It comes from an experience I had in Japan. It’s kind of the typical English class that I see in my head whenever I hear that word. It’s kind of dark, there’s no movement. It’s not a happy picture.

So what do I want to do if I want to change my belief about English and English classes? One thing I can do is change the pictures I make in my head. So, for example, we can take that picture, we can change it. We can choose a better picture. Instead I can see a circle of students. Let’s imagine a circle of students. And then I’m going to add color. Everybody is wearing nice colorful clothes. And then I imagine everybody smiling, big smiles. And I imagine movement, I add movement to the picture. 

So now people are up, they’re jumping around, they’re moving, they’re talking. They’re alive. I add sound. I add happy, talking, smiling, laughing, maybe a little music in the background. I take this happy, colorful picture and I make it bigger in my head. I bring it closer to me and bigger so it fills up everything in front of me. Now do that yourself.

Imagine this happy picture of an English class and make it big and colorful, with sound, with laughter, with music. Does it change the way you feel about this word…English class? It probably does.

So we can do this with anything, with any image. And what you do is you take first your negative image, so let’s go back again to the negative, sad image of an English class. Maybe you can remember one from your past. What we’re going to do now is look at that negative picture and we’re going to change it like it’s a TV set and we’re going to play around with it. So the first thing I want you to do is make it darker. So you have this picture in your head, it’s a negative feeling, it’s a negative memory…make it darker.

Make the picture darker in your head. Next, push it away from you. So if it’s close to you, push it away so that it becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. Keep pushing it away until it disappears to nothing. And now suddenly, think of the positive, happy picture. So replace it with the big, large, colorful, loud picture in your head of a happy, fun English class. See it in your head and let yourself feel how you would feel if you were in that picture. So put yourself now into the picture, step into it so now you are in that English class with all these smiling, happy people with all this color, with all this laughter, with all the music. Does that change how you feel? It should, it usually does.

So what you want to do now is program yourself to do this every time. So what you do, you do this same process again and again and again. Maybe 50 times, maybe 100 times. You do it quickly. So, for example, you go back again. Go back to the negative image. Okay, see that negative class, oh, boring, terrible, that old memory you have. And again, quickly, make it darker, make it smaller. Push it away, smaller, smaller, smaller, until it disappears. And now suddenly, boom, see the big, happy, colorful picture again. This great, happy, wonderful English class, and step into the picture again. Feel yourself there with all these people who are laughing and having a great time. See the color. Make it big. Okay, great.

Now back again to the negative one, the old memory. See it again, the old, negative, terrible English class. And again, make it darker. Turn the light down, darker, darker, and then now make it smaller and push it away, farther, farther, farther, until it disappears. Boom! See the big, happy, wonderful English class again, color, laughter, happiness. Step into that picture. Be part of it.

Now you can do this again and again and again. In fact, you could do this every day, maybe 10 times or 20 times. If you’re really motivated you could do it 100 times in a row at the same time, very fast. You take the negative picture, you shrink it, you make it darker, you push it away. It disappears suddenly, boom, a big, happy, positive, colorful picture. And then you go back to the negative, disappear, boom, a big, happy, colorful, positive picture, again and again and again.

So here’s what happens. What’s really interesting is when you do this again and again and again you are programming your brain like a computer. So after you do it enough times, in the future when you think English class, or someone says English class, automatically this process happens. Automatically, boom, you see in your head a big, happy, wonderful picture and you feel really good. You’re teaching yourself to feel good about this phrase or this idea or this experience called English class. And in this way you can totally change your feelings about English or English class.

You can do this with any negative memory or negative image you have in your head. If you’ve had several bad experiences with English, take those pictures, take those memories, do this same process. Look at them carefully. Then make them darker, then smaller. Then push them away, and then suddenly, boom, replace them with a big, positive, happy, colorful picture and then join the picture. And back again and again and again and again, you know, probably you need a total of 100 to 200 times, so you can do it very, very fast. It just takes a few seconds, so in 5 minutes or 10 minutes, you could do this 100 times or 150 times. And you’re programming your brain just like a computer to think in a more positive way. So you can totally change the way you feel about English learning. You can totally change your old, negative memories, beliefs and feelings about English.

What will this do for you? It will give you so much more energy when you learn English. It will totally change your feelings about learning English that will help your motivation and that will cause you to learn faster. All of the things we’re learning in this program

and these lessons are about getting you to learn faster. It’s not just about feeling happy about English, it’s about learning more quickly, more efficiently. And it just so happens that having more positive emotions and more energy and more motivation will cause you to learn English much, much faster.

I’ve seen this myself in my experience as a teacher with many of my students. And there’s also a lot of academic research about this same topic. And it all says the same thing. That when you’re happy, when you’re motivated, when you have strong, positive feelings and thoughts about the language you’re learning, in this case English, you learn much faster. That the psychology and the emotion is more important than the method.

Good methods are important, of course. You want to use the best methods, but without the psychology, without the emotion, no method will work successfully. You absolutely must take care of this part of the learning process. You must manage your thoughts,

your emotions, your motivation, if you truly want to speak excellent English. 

So, your homework is go through this process. Take some of your negative feelings and memories about English. And then using the same process, see the picture. Make it darker, smaller, push it away, and then suddenly replace it with a big, strong, positive image, picture. And I want you to do this again and again and again. I want you to do it 100 times in a row, very quickly. I think you’ll find that it will make big changes to the way you feel about English and will really boost up and strengthen your motivation. 

Okay, that is all for this lesson. I will see you for the vocab.