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.