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 DURING
World War II, Ted Bengermino was responsible for maintaining
records of men killed or missing in action. He often had to take
the personal effects of soldiers killed in action and send the
things to the young men’s parents, and he worried himself
sick that his department might make a mistake. What if they accidentally
told the wrong parents their son was dead?
Bengermino was anxious so often, he started
worrying about his own health. He lost thirty-four pounds from
worry and exhaustion. He worried he might be a physical wreck
when he went home after the war. He cried when he was alone.
“There was a period soon after the Battle of the Bulge started,”
he said, “that I gave up hope of ever being a normal human
being again.”
He eventually ended up in the Army dispensary.
The doctor examined Ted and concluded his problem was mental.
“Ted,” he said, “I want you to think of your life
as an hourglass…”
The doctor explained the basic truth: We
all want to do more in a day than can be done. But we’ve
got to take the tasks one at a time. If we don’t, it would
be like trying to force the grains of sand through the narrow
part of the hourglass. We would break under the strain.
The advice of the doctor was Ted’s
turning point. He often said to himself, “One grain of sand
at a time…One task at a time.” That became his slotra. He practiced
thinking it. And he began to recover.
After the war, working for a printing company,
he sometimes felt pressure and he became anxious and tense. The
slotra would come into his mind, “One grain of sand at a
time. One task at a time.”
“By repeating those words to myself
over and over,” he said, “I accomplished my tasks in
a more efficient manner and I did my work without the confused
and jumbled feeling that had almost wrecked me on the battlefield.”
When you want to make a change in your
life, remember that the key is remembering to think something
specific at specific times. To ingrain a thought, make a
slotra and repeat it. It’s the power tool for change.
REMIND YOURSELF
Miki has been shy her whole life. She feels
anxious around people, especially when she feels she’s being
watched or judged. She feels strongly compelled to make sure
people don’t disapprove of her. She tries to please everybody
and in doing so, she limits her self-expression. She doesn’t
feel free to be herself. She feels she must make sure everybody
is pleased with her.
One day she realizes it’s okay if
every person is not a hundred percent pleased with her. In fact,
it’s impossible. She can’t please everybody. And she’s
no longer willing to sacrifice her own integrity and honesty
to make shallow people more comfortable.
That’s a great insight. Will it make
any difference? It could. But tomorrow, when Miki is talking
to her father, the old patterns will be there very strongly.
She may forget all about her insight.
There is one technique that can preserve
her insight: She will need to remind herself. Not by writing
it in a journal that she may not read until three years from
now. Not by thinking about it once or twice. But by taking on
the task of reminding herself like it is important. How
can she remind herself in a way that she cannot ignore or overlook?
This is our task also. We have insights
all the time. Will they make any difference? It depends on how
successfully we remind ourselves. Of course, you have to be selective.
Some of the things you learn aren’t worth taking the time
to ingrain. But when you find one, take the task seriously and
do it wholeheartedly. Don’t let that insight fade away.
Make it real. Let it change your life for the better.
Put the insight on your screensaver. Write
it on a card and keep it in your pocket. Pull it out and look
at it several times a day. Post it on your dashboard, on the
refrigerator, on the bathroom mirror. Have it engraved on a pendant
and wear it. Record it onto a tape and listen to it while you
drive. And I’m not talking about doing one of these, like
some sort of gesture. I mean do them all and anything
else you can think of. Get serious about remembering your insights!
And here’s a hot tip: Your brain stops
looking at stationary things. If Miki put a giant poster on her
wall that says: “It’s okay if every person is not a
hundred percent pleased with you,” even if the letters are
six feet high, within a couple weeks she won’t notice the
poster any more. Her brain will get used to seeing it. Her brain
already knows what the poster says and will stop registering
it.
That means if you post something on your
bathroom mirror, you’ll have to move it to another location
after a couple days or you will stop noticing it. Or you can
ask your spouse to move it for you. Use your ingenuity to come
up with novel ways to remind you of the insight.
I remembered to unroll the sleeves the
first day I tried, because my decision was fresh in my mind.
But then for three days I forgot. Then I reminded myself, and
started concentrating on reminding myself, and did it for two
days. Then I forgot for a few more. Eventually I formed a new
habit. Now I’ve unrolled those shirtsleeves so many times,
it would be difficult to remember to leave them rolled up.
You know how it is. There are lots of things
we do automatically like that. We’ve done them so many times,
the sequence of movements doesn’t require our attention,
so our attention goes to other things while we do it.
For most people, driving a car is like
that, which is amazing because driving a car is a complex activity,
which anyone first learning to drive is painfully aware of. You
have to pay attention to the road, other cars, signs, turns,
etc., and move the steering wheel and foot-pedals in response
to what you see. There’s a lot going on. A lot to remember.
But after driving for a few years, most
people can do it all without really paying attention. When something
unusual happens, you “wake up” and put your attention
on the road, almost as if you took over the manual control of
a car driving on “automatic pilot.”
If driving conditions are normal, an experienced
driver can engage in a conversation with a passenger while the
automatic pilot watches and responds to the driving situation.
Amazing!
That amazing level of automatic behavior
was created just by doing something many times.
But there are some things you’ve done
even more often than driving, like tying your shoes. And thinking.
Have you ever seen a child learn to tie
his shoes? You’ve forgotten what a complex task it is. You’ve
done it thousands of times. If you tried to tie your shoes a
different way now, you’d have a hard time. Each one of your
movements is a cue or a trigger for the next movement in the
sequence, and each has been linked together again and again.
It’s a habit. It happens automatically. And when you’re
doing it, you don’t really pay attention to the task. If
you tried doing it differently you would have to work on it and
it wouldn’t be easy.
It’s the same way with your thoughts.
You’ve had some sequences of thoughts thousands of times,
often triggered by the same or similar events.
For example, when someone you love has
an unhappy look on her/his face, it triggers a sequence of thoughts.
You’ve gone through the sequence of thoughts so many times,
you aren’t even aware of them any more. All you know is
the end result: You feel bad. You may have gone through that
same sequence of thoughts since you first began to think.
When you were a child and your parents
gave you that look, you first formed your sequence of thoughts,
however primitive they were back then. Those thought-patterns
may have been the first complex thoughts you ever had. And if
you’ve never stopped and changed those patterns, you’ve
been going through the same patterns over and over almost your
entire life, having the same feelings in response to those same
facial expressions.
Then I come along and tell you to pay attention
to what you’re thinking. But by the time you feel a negative
emotion, you’ve already gone through the sequence of thoughts
that got you there. And you did it so quickly, you didn’t
even know you were thinking. I had a hard enough time becoming
aware enough to remember to unroll my shirtsleeves. It’s
far more difficult to become aware of your thinking when you
feel bad.
But while it’s true your habits can
get you into trouble sometimes, habits are also tremendously
useful. Habits are not the enemy. Habits are how you hold onto
patterns, useful or not. If you weren’t able to form habits,
life would be much more difficult.
The fact that you can form habits and that
those habits are resistant to change is good because when you
have a useful sequence of thoughts or actions, you won't have
to try to remember every time. You can relax and put your attention
on other things.
Because habits are hard to break, you can
gain something. It’s like a ratchet. It allows you to move
forward, but prevents you from slipping back. So you can get
somewhere. You can improve.
The only catch is when you need to change
a habit that already exists.
BLAZING A NEW PATH
A habit or thought pattern is like a well-worn
path through a large meadow. If you’re going to cross this
meadow, the easiest way to do it is by following the path.
But let’s say the path takes you to
a swamp, and that’s not where you want to go anymore. There
are berry bushes in a corner of the meadow, and that’s what
you want.
 The
only problem is, there is no path to the berry bushes and the
grass in the meadow is four feet high and hard to walk through.
Obviously, the thing you need to do is
to make a new path. It will be hard. It will be a lot harder
than going down the well-worn path to the swamp. But if you want
to form a new path, that’s what you need to do.
You can start your new path anywhere along
the old path — as long as you eventually aim toward the
berry bushes.
Your brain is very close to that analogy.
When you learn something new, it forms a pattern of paths between
your brain cells. The more times the same thing goes over the
same path, the stronger the signal gets, and the more likely
it will fire next time.
For instance, when you first learn someone’s
name, it’s a new pathway in your brain: You’re connecting
this person’s face with the name David. The path is weak:
You’ve only walked to the berry bushes once. When someone
asks you what his name is, you have to struggle to remember.
But after awhile, by connecting David’s
face with his name over and over, the path through your brain
becomes well-worn. It’s easy for your brain to go down that
particular path. It feels like there is no other way to go. Someone
asks you, “What’s his name?” and automatically
you say, “David.”
In the meadow, let’s say you’ve
walked to the berry bushes a couple of times. When you begin
down the original path again, you come to a fork in the path:
there’s a well-worn path that leads to a swamp, and there’s
another one — rough and difficult to walk on, but visible
— that leads to berry bushes.
What happens when you choose the berry
bush path every time you come to the fork? It becomes easier
and easier to walk down. And what happens to the other path?
It grows over and becomes more and more difficult to walk down.
A new habit is forming and at some point it will hold without
effort. It will become automatic.
For example: Once upon a time, I found
it difficult to sit at my computer and write while Klassy, my
wife, was in the room. I felt I was being rude. So I did most
of my writing late at night after she went to bed, and then slept
late.
But I didn’t like sleeping away so
much of the daylight. I tried to write in the morning, but I
let her interrupt me. I felt bad when I told her not to interrupt.
She didn’t have a problem with it, but while I was writing,
I felt bad. It felt as if she must resent me. It was really stupid,
but somehow I had this habit of thinking. It was a sequence of
thoughts. Klassy had no problem with it. It was all in my head.
I knew my life would work better if I wrote
in the daytime while Klassy was around. The first time I tried
it, I was distracted by feelings of guilt. So I asked myself
what I was thinking. My answer: “She resents me. She wants
to talk to me but feels shut out. Her feelings are hurt.”
I talked some sense into myself: “She
already told me she doesn’t resent me.” And I kept
writing. Every time the thoughts came up, I argued with them
again. Now they don’t come up any more. And I am writing
during the day and sleeping at night. It worked quickly because
I had several opportunities every day to practice.
OPPORTUNITIES TO PRACTICE
I’m sure you’ve tried to change
a habit many times — an eating habit, exercise, the way
you communicate, whatever — and found it difficult. Do you
know what made it difficult? It wasn’t because you didn’t
really want to. It wasn’t because you didn’t try or
weren’t sincere. It wasn’t because you “lacked
discipline.” It was because the opportunities to practice
were too far apart. For the love of all that is holy, you
must remember this!
Your brain and the meadow work in the same
way: If you came by one day and struggled your way across the
meadow to the berry bushes and then came back a month
later, what happened to the path to the berry bushes? It’s
gone. It has grown over.
In the same way, when you have an insight
— and you know it’s a good insight and will change
your life — and then it comes to nothing, it’s because
too much time has gone by between the moment of insight and the
next opportunity to use that insight. When the opportunity finally
came, the pathway in your brain was gone.
One insight will usually not be enough:
It’s only one walk through the meadow. It’s a single
pass through a new pattern in your brain.
Have you ever had the frustrating experience
of knowing exactly what you need to do to solve a problem or
reach a goal only to have time go by without anything coming
of your great insight? Well, there was probably nothing wrong
with the insight itself. It was just one walk through the meadow.
If you then tell that thought to someone
else, it’s another walk through the meadow. If you then
write it on a card and post it on your bathroom mirror, that’s
another walk. If you read it the next morning, that’s another
walk. And after enough of these walks, a faint path begins to
form, and the more times you go down that path, the clearer it
becomes, and analogously, the more you think that insight, the
easier it becomes to think it, the more natural it becomes until
eventually it becomes “second nature.” Eventually when
you look at the field there is only one way to go: There is only
one path and all the others have grown over.
Of course a faster way would be to repeat
that thought over and over fifty, a hundred, two hundred times
a day. It would be like walking back and forth on the meadow
two hundred times a day. It doesn’t take many days to make
that thought very easy to think and come to you naturally.
And when thought habits change, behavior
and feeling habits change, and when those change, the kinds of
results you get change too.
Another good way to establish a new pattern
is to create opportunities to practice. Don't wait for
natural opportunities to happen. Often you can’t do it in
real life. If you’re trying to change the way you react
when your spouse gets mad at you, for example, you probably don’t
want to make your spouse mad at you every day for three weeks
so you can lay down a new pattern in your brain. That would be
too rough on everyone. But you can practice in your head, and
it’ll still form a new pattern in your brain.
The fastest way to learn someone’s
name is to use her name a lot and repeat it in your mind the
first time you meet her. Every time you say her name to yourself
while looking at her face, you’re strengthening that pathway
in your brain. Saying it to yourself and visualizing her face
works as well as saying it out loud while looking at her face.
Mental rehearsal lays down patterns in the brain and nervous
system just as well as real-live practice.
Have you read about the now famous experiments
with basketball players? One group practiced making shots out
on the court. Another group practiced making shots in their minds.
The ones who mentally rehearsed improved nearly as much as those
who practiced in reality. The experiment has been repeated with
other tasks with the same results. Making a new pathway in your
brain does not require reality. Imagination can do it.
When you try to form a new mental habit
with any of the ideas in this book, make sure you practice often
enough to form a new pathway. Those opportunities to practice
must be close together.
If you’re dealing with something that
happens every day, it won’t be a problem. But if the opportunity
to use the new pattern is spaced further apart, then practice
it mentally: Imagine situations that might happen or have already
happened, and walk yourself through the new pattern several times.
Do it again the next day, several times.
Keep this up until you have a real-live
opportunity, and if you go down the new pathway automatically
several times, you don’t need to practice anymore.
That’s how to make new paths in your
life.
I want to emphasize that when you practice
in your mind, it’s important to start before the veer-off
point. That’s the crucial place. The patterns you already
have go right by that place without stopping. So the most important
part of the path to work on is the point of departure
from the old pattern.
What’s going to remind you to take
a new direction? Practice that, and go through the rest of the
new path. Follow it all the way to the berry bushes. Try to never
go down the old path again. Let it grow over and disappear.
This is the nuts and bolts of how to make
your insights stick. This is how to make a change and hold it.
This is how to form new habits. Go over the path enough to make
a solid pathway.
One important principle is to focus on
one thing at a time. Find one insight that will make a big difference,
and focus on that. Until you have something specific to work
on, it is very difficult to get anywhere. Work on one thing and
make significant gain on it. Then go to the next thing.
Read next: The
Slotrology Of Motivation And Focus
This article is part of a series on Slotralogy.
Read the first section here: Slotralogy
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