Mental Mastery, Right Effort

Welcome to the Effortless English Show with the world's number one English teacher, A.J. Hogue, where A.J. 's more than 40 million students worldwide finally learn English once and for all without the boring textbooks, classrooms, and grammar drills. Here's A.J.

with a quick piece to help you learn to speak fluent English effortlessly. Hi, I'm A.J. Hogue, the author of Effortless English, Learn to Speak English Like a Native.

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That's all you need to do. You just have to stay in the program and keep doing it every day, of course. If you don't do the program, of course you don't get the results. But when you do the program and you stay a member and you keep doing it each day, just follow the program.

You will get the results. Look, ask on social media. You don't have to trust me. Ask all the many other members who have... gotten great results and are getting continuing to get great results join the VIP program at effortlessenglishclub.com effortlessenglishclub.com it's a cold day here in Japan today's really the first day I'd say it feels like winter to me it's cloudy

And it's cold. I've been out playing with my nephew outside and, oh, cold. I've got several layers on. Layers are kind of, you know, understand layers are like different, are levels.

So when we say I am wearing several layers, it means you're wearing lots of clothes. In the winter, you could wear one big heavy coat, for example, one big jacket or one big heavy coat to stay warm. That's one layer.

Or you can wear 10 shirts. That would be 10 layers, right? I like to wear lots of layers because sometimes I'm exercising, so I get warm, I start getting hot. I can take off a couple layers, take off a jacket, take off a sweater.

And then if I stop moving, then I get cold. Or, you know, if it's windy, I feel colder. If it's not windy and it's sunny, then I feel less cold. So it's more flexible.

I like it. I'll wear like a nice warm under layer and then maybe a t-shirt over that. Then a normal collar shirt over that. Then maybe a sweater if it's really cold.

Then maybe a vest on top of that. And then finally a jacket. If necessary. Today's not that cold. I don't need that many layers today, but it is chilly.

It is quite cold today. For me, at least. Now, I know those of you from very cold countries will probably laugh and we think, ah, AJ, it's nothing. Nothing.

You're just getting your first cold day now. It's December. Some of you had snow back in October, I remember. All right. You guys from the great north.

The Canadians. The Russians. The Swedes and Norwegians and Finns. I know. But I'm kind of weak about the cold. I don't like the cold. I like warm weather.

I was raised in the south in the United States. Where it's nice and warm. Our winters are not so bad. Let's talk about states. Just recently I was reading a book about what's called right effort.

Right effort. Right means, you know, good and moral. M-O-R-A-L. And effort, you know, right? And right effort has the idea of, you know, Making energy in your body and in your mind for a good purpose.

That's the idea, right? Effort. Now, of course, you could have wrong effort. You can try really hard and use a lot of energy to do something that's bad or wrong or unhealthy.

Don't want to do that. But for something good, effort, we do need energy, right? Even effortless English, you need some effort every day to do it. Eventually, your speaking, your English speaking, will become effortless.

It will feel effortless. But before that, you need some effort. I've said this many times. I've said it in my book. Effortless English does not mean lazy English.

No, no, no. Specifically, we need right effort, good strong effort, positive effort. for what I like to call mental mastery. Mental mastery. What is mental mastery?

It's very important. Mental mastery also includes emotional mastery. On one hand, we have a lot of people in the world who have very little mental mastery, very little emotional mastery.

They're very passive. What this means is that they have little control, very little discipline, very little control, self-discipline, very little control about their own thoughts and their own emotions.

So instead it's the opposite. They seem to be controlled. by something else. That something else usually is going to be the schools and the media. These are the two big ones where people get programmed, basically almost like a computer and software.

People get programmed with ideas and beliefs and emotions and attitudes and even moods. by television, by movies, and certainly by the whole long process of schooling.

And eventually these become a habit, and it's like the person has been programmed or is being partly controlled from the outside. And what's really terrible is sometimes, many times, the person will realize, they realize, I've got all these terrible negative thoughts, I've got all these bad feelings.

And then they cause me to do bad actions. But I can't stop. That's what it means to have no mental mastery, no emotional mastery, no self-control. A lot of people feel helpless, like their thoughts and their emotions are almost...

something from the outside, something that just comes and then completely controls them and makes them do all kinds of things that really they don't want to do. Now, of course, all of us have this. I mean, to some level, we all have this. We all struggle sometimes to do what we know is right.

We struggle to avoid bad habits. We have to fight to make ourselves not be lazy and We all have, at times, negative thoughts come into our head. They just seem to come from nowhere.

Of course, they're not really coming from nowhere. It's just maybe it's coming from something that we saw or read or some experience in life that we had, but maybe a while ago, long ago. And then something happens in the world now.

or even in our mind, that for some reason it brings that back, and then suddenly we feel angry, or suddenly we're in a bad mood, or suddenly we're thinking really negative thoughts, or suddenly we're feeling really depressed.

Sometimes we can wake up that way. I mean, this happens to me sometimes. I'll wake up, and maybe my energy's low, and then I just... Right off the bat, starting in a kind of negative mindset.

So all of that happens. But the question then is, can we do something about that? Are we powerless or are there things we can do? And actually there are things we can do.

And this is what the topic of right effort is about. This is also something that a lot of people NLP... focuses on this. NLP is a kind of, I call it just success psychology.

The history of NLP basically is two guys, Grinder and Bandler are their last names, that looked at the psychology field, right? Psychologists, the whole field of psychology. Like if you go to school and you study psychology,

What do you learn? And what they saw, what they realized is that psychology is a big disaster. It's terrible. Psychology is dominated by a lot of the ideas of Sigmund Freud, who was kind of a crazy person.

Very unscientific, not scientific. And the worst of all is that psychology and psychiatry both are focused on unhealthy people. Their whole focus was on studying, and still is, on studying people who have lots of mental problems and emotional problems.

Well, Bandler and Grinder thought, well, that's crazy. If we want to help people, we should study the opposite. We should study people who are happy. We should study people who are successful.

We should study people who are confident. and find out how do they do it. How do they think? How do they act? How do they manage their emotions? What do they do to get those good results?

And if we study those people, then we can teach the other people how to do it. So if someone is depressed, we can teach them how to be happy. We do that by studying happy people. If we study depressed people, we only learn how to be depressed.

We don't learn how to change it. Tony Robbins learned from these guys. Tony Robbins is kind of a famous... He's actually more famous than Bandler and Grindler, the ones who started NLP.

Tony Robbins learned from them, went to one of their seminars, and took their ideas. He wrote books about their ideas, and of course he added his own ideas. And Tony Robbins has become a very big and successful speaker and writer and teacher.

And so Tony Robbins talks about this a lot. And Tony Robbins uses the word state. This is another English word that has several meanings. One meaning of state is like province, region.

It's an area inside of a country. In the United States of America. The United States of America. America has 50 states. That's one meaning, but that's not the meaning for psychology or emotions.

Another meaning of state, the one we're using now, is kind of your mood. It's really your mood. It's kind of your emotions and your thoughts. So you can say, I'm in a very positive, good state right now.

It means you're in a good mood and you have a good attitude and you're thinking good thoughts. Your state is positive right now. Your state is good. Or we could talk about negative states.

Negative states, that's when you're thinking negative things. That's when you're feeling bad. You're feeling negative emotions. That's a negative state.

And a lot of the... successful people in life, they get good results because they know how to control their states. This is one of the main, I wouldn't say one of the, it's probably the main, the number one teaching of Tony Robbins.

Managing your states. Learning how to change your state. We have an idiom, state of mind. It's a common phrase. State of mind. State of mind, again, it's your mindset, it's your attitude, it's your mood.

All of that together. So learning how to manage and control your state of mind. Very important and very powerful, right? You can imagine. If you are always feeling depressed and thinking sad thoughts all the time from the morning until the night, it will be very difficult for you to be successful in anything in life.

Even if you want to, even if you have good goals, even if you are very intelligent. But you just, you won't want to. You're kind of like, oh, you'll wake up and you'll feel depressed and sad and you'll think, oh, I should exercise, I should exercise. But then, but you won't.

Because you're in such a bad state of mind, a bad state. Right? You're so depressed. Right? Of course, we all know this. It's obvious, right? How depressed people.

Depressed people usually are not healthy physically because they just lay around and they do nothing. They're not motivated to do anything. Even though in their mind, their true self, maybe we would say, or their highest self knows they should do something different, but they don't.

Because they don't know how to change the state of mind. And it's not easy. I'll tell you that. It's not easy all the time. I can't do it all the time.

Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. But it's a battle and it's something that you should definitely work on. The more you learn to change your state, the more techniques you learn to change your state, how you're feeling and thinking right now, the better results you'll get in life and in general, the happier you will be.

And that's what is called right effort. It's an effort to manage and master your mindsets, your states of mind. The ideas are simple, but doing it's not easy. It's one of those many things in life, right?

There are many things in life that are simple, but difficult. Running an ultra marathon, for example. I've used this example many times because it's so clear.

An ultra marathon, that's like a double marathon. It's simple. There's nothing to do. You just walk or run. It's not complicated. It's easy to understand.

Just keep moving your feet. But it's not easy. It's very tough, right? It's very tough for your body. It's tough for your mind to keep going. It's very difficult.

So simple but difficult. Same idea. Managing your mindsets, emotional mastery, mental mastery is simple. But it's difficult, meaning you've got to keep practicing, keep doing it.

I'm still doing it. It's something you really have to do for all of life. It never really stops. It's kind of like your physical health, right? You have to do it every single day.

And some days maybe you're not feeling so good and you're a little more tired some days. And other days you have more energy and feel good. But in general, you have to keep trying, right? You have to make a good effort with yourself.

body to to move your body to stay strong you have to do it every day as long as you are alive you can't stop if you stop exercising your body you'll get weak and weak and weak and then you'll get sick and lots of problems so you can't stop well it's the same idea with this is kind of like mental exercise managing your mind it's the same idea you never stop

Let's talk about the three kind of obvious ways to do this. Number one, the simplest and the first step is to prevent negative states. So if you can prevent it before it happens, that's the easiest one.

It's kind of like your health again. If you can prevent sickness, if you can prevent disease, that's the best one, right? After you're sick already, well, then it's more difficult to get better. But if you just prevent sickness, it's much, much, much, much easier.

And it's a happier situation. Well, it's the same idea with your mind. So, the first thing to do is just to prevent lots of terrible negative thoughts. It's to prevent...

You know, lots of negative emotions. How do you do that, though? How do you prevent it? I'll give you a few little techniques. Perhaps the simplest and easiest, the one I've been using lately, is to focus on being aware and mindful of right now, the present moment.

You just focus your mind on what's happening right now. When you really, truly, completely are focused on this moment right now, then it's less likely that negative thoughts and negative emotions will pop into your head. A lot of times when we feel negative, it's because we're thinking about something from the past, something bad or something that

It makes us angry or annoys us or whatever, sad, a problem from the past or, of course, the future. That's not a common one, right? We're thinking about the future, some problem, some difficulty, something we're worried about.

And then that makes all the... Negative thoughts get stronger and the negative emotions get stronger and come up. And then it just can get worse and worse and worse. And then you're in a bad mood.

And then your whole day can be terrible. It can start from something quite small. So one way to avoid this, just to prevent it, is don't get distracted so much about the future and the past. Just focus on right now.

Now, the simplest way to do this is you can focus on just one thing. One sense. Senses are like you're hearing, seeing, tasting, right? Usually it's easy.

You can do more than one, but it's easiest just to focus on one. So for example, let's say you're standing in the train. You can just focus on the sights. Just look around and notice everything that you see.

Look at the people. Really see them. Not just quickly look, but really don't stare at them and make them uncomfortable, but you know what I mean. Just look and notice them.

You can notice the clothes they're wearing. Notice the light in the train. Is it dark? Is it bright? What's the color of the light? Notice the decorations in the train.

Are there posters in the train? Notice the floors. Notice the ceilings. Notice outside the windows. the city that's passing by as you're riding. Focus your mental energy, your attention, focus it on sights on what you're seeing right now in this moment and stay focused on that.

Just by doing that, because you're focusing your energy, your attention on on what you're seeing right now, this will actually prevent a lot of negative stuff from coming up in your mind. It's a good way to prevent negative mindsets or attitudes or thoughts.

Of course, you don't have to do sight. You could close your eyes, if you're sitting down especially, and just focus on sounds instead. Sometimes that's even more powerful, especially if you are distracted and

it can be more powerful to close your eyes and just listen and notice all of the sounds you're hearing right now. Try to notice them all. Another common one, again, often helps to close your eyes, is feeling, like the sensations in your body.

So again, you close your eyes and you can kind of, with your mind, your attention, focus on your feet and then your legs and then your stomach and then your back and then your shoulders and then your arms and then your neck and then your head and just notice how everything feels. Are some muscles tight? Are some muscles relaxed?

Do you feel warm in certain places? Do you feel cold in certain places? Sometimes you can kind of feel energy. It feels like you're feeling the energy in your body.

And sometimes you can even feel the energy moving around inside your body. And again, it's happening right now. Some people, you can do smells sometimes, especially if there's a strong smell around you. Like if you go to a restaurant, for example, you could maybe close your eyes for a minute and just notice the smells coming from the kitchen, coming from the dining room.

And of course, there's taste too. If you're at a meal or if you're drinking something, I mentioned this before about enjoying the finer things. For example, if you're drinking coffee, instead of just drinking it fast, focus on your senses right now. The first thing you could do is just smell the coffee.

Really smell it, you know. Put it under your nose. And take time, slow down in this moment right now and notice the smell of the coffee. And then the same with the taste.

Don't just drink it fast. Drink a little bit. Maybe move it around your mouth and your tongue and Try to notice all of the flavors of the coffee. And you can do this, you know, people who do this with food where they'll smell the food and they'll look at the food and notice it, right?

It's just focusing on your senses right now is a great way. It's great prevention. It keeps you in the moment now and it can actually put you in a good mood. It helps your mind become a little more peaceful.

You appreciate what's happening right now. So those are positive things. So it can help to create positive mindsets and positive feelings. But also, it helps you to avoid focusing on other negative things that maybe you might focus on usually.

Now, another key way to prevent negative states of mind, a really big one, is to avoid negative media. especially now in our modern world. This was not a problem as much a thousand years ago, but now it's a huge, huge issue because we are surrounded by media and we're carrying these phones that are full of media, you know, videos and text and websites and all this stuff. And then TVs are everywhere.

There's something I just, I hate this, you know, I, uh, You go into a restaurant and there are TVs everywhere. You go to the airport, there are TVs everywhere. And what are they playing?

All this negative stuff, right? All these lies and propaganda and all this terrible stuff. So doing your best to avoid that, again, that stuff will just put you in a negative mindset. So do your best to avoid it.

That's good prevention. And I guess the final way to prevent, just to avoid negative mindsets, is also to avoid negative people as much as possible. There are certain people in your life or at your job around you who are negative, who are angry, who are always depressed, who just make you feel bad. Avoid them.

Stay away from them. Don't talk to them. Okay, so that's the first... The second step for mental mastery is prevention. Prevent the negative. The second one is to abandon the negative.

Sometimes we can't prevent it. Sometimes it's just not possible. Like with people. You might do your best to avoid negative people, but you can't always do it.

You might just be on a bus or a train and there's just some crazy person yelling or someone just says something mean to you or someone's rude or whatever.

And also just sometimes, like I said, sometimes you don't really know why, but you just have a bad mindset, a bad mood. I mean, this happens to me. It happens sometimes. For me, it's often in the mornings.

I'm not a morning person. So if I have to wake up a bit early and I didn't get quite enough sleep, I will often wake up in a bad mood. And what's interesting is then, at night, I'm almost always in a good mood.

Strange. But anyway, it just happens, right? Sometimes we don't quite know why, but it's just that we do our best to prevent the negative moods. We try to be mindful.

We use those techniques. But even though we try, it still happens. You don't feel good. You're feeling sad and depressed. You're feeling tired. You're feeling just irritable, kind of angry, right?

Or just lots of negative thoughts keep popping in your head. Or maybe you worry a lot. Some people are worriers and you find yourself thinking about all kinds of possible problems in the future and you're worried about them.

Some people more focus on the past and some bad things or problems or difficulties from your past keep coming into your head and making you feel bad. So then now we've got to go to step two because we did our best to prevent, but sometimes it doesn't happen. What do you do when it's already there? And this is a lot of what Tony Robbins teaches, in fact, is how to change.

Once the negative comes, once you're already feeling bad, you're already thinking badly, negatively, then what do you do? Well, then you have to, obviously, you have to somehow change it.

We need some techniques then to change a negative mindset to a positive one, or at least a more positive one. How do we do that? Well, one of the main things is to change your focus.

Again, change your attention. Because when you're feeling bad and feeling negative, just naturally you will start to focus on negative things. You'll start thinking about negative things. You'll start

complaining, saying negative things. So one of the things you can do is just think of something positive. What are some examples of this? Well, one really good example is just to think of people you love, like the people you care the most about, your closest family and friends, and think about them and just kind of just say something positive, like, you know, just like a wish or a prayer.

If you're religious, they're just hoping for them to be happy. Not yourself. but just focusing on them first. Just say, yeah, yeah, maybe imagine them smiling and just kind of wishing happiness for them.

And then after you do that for them, then you could also say to yourself, you know, I hope, I want to be happy too. This is love. Love is a nice cure. It's compassion.

It's also called compassion, right? Compassion means feeling kindness for another person not yourself, or another being. It could even be an animal. Another way to change your focus, you're feeling kind of bad, is to do what we talked about in the last show, and that's to focus on gratitude.

Get a piece of paper and very quickly, very fast, just write down ten things you are grateful for in your life. Ten things that are good in your life.

For example, you are alive and you're not dead. That's a good one. You can start with that. Even if you're feeling horrible and everything's bad, well, at least I'm not dead now.

You're not starving, I'm sure. You probably have food. That's a good one to be grateful for. Hopefully you're not freezing to death. So that's a good one to be grateful for.

You can start with things like that. When you really think about it, and you think about the history of human beings, and you think about some of the suffering and the terrible things that happen and have happened in the past still happen to people everywhere in the world, you actually can be very grateful that, wow, at least those really, really, really bad things are not happening to me right now.

that's something to be grateful for. Just that can help you start focusing on things that are more positive. And then from there, then you can focus on things that are actually really good. Again, the people in your life that you care about, grateful for them.

Even if you have a job that you hate, at least you have a job and you're making money. You're not starving to death, so you can be grateful for that. At least I have a job. At least I'm not, you know, completely unemployed with no money at all.

So you try that. Maybe that's still not working. Maybe it helps some. Just from experience, I know. Sometimes it doesn't work completely. You try to do that, but it still doesn't completely work.

But it should at least start you feeling a little more positive. One of my favorite things to do, especially recently, is I just start to meditate. I will... When I have this negative thing, these feelings and mood, and I'm trying to think of positive things, it's not quite working, then I will just focus on my breathing.

I practice... So I'll just sit down. I'll close my eyes and I will focus. I'll try to use all of my energy to focus just on my breathing, just the feeling of my breathing, specifically the feeling of the air going in and out of my nose.

right at the point of my nose. Why? Because it's such a small area. So that forces me to concentrate very hard. I have to use a lot of energy to concentrate on that spot at my nose where the air is going in and out, in and out.

And I'll just keep doing that. And of course, if I'm feeling bad and I'm thinking bad things, then of course, it's kind of a fight because I'll focus on my breathing and then I'll get distracted and I'll go back to thinking about

Some negative thing and then I'll realize I'm thinking negative again and then I'll use my effort, my energy to focus my attention back on my nose, back on the air going in and out. And it can be a fight for a while.

But eventually, if I keep fighting, what happens is this is very powerful. This is a very powerful way to calm your mind. Because if I can do it, if I can have a little bit of quiet to really do this, I find that after about 10-15 minutes that my mind becomes much more peaceful.

And my concentration will get better and better and better and better until I'm really focused on that breathing. And as I focus more and more and more on the breathing, my attention gets better. My concentration gets better.

Then the negative thoughts and feelings... get a little weaker, weaker, weaker, and weaker. They start to fade away, to slowly disappear. So this one's very powerful.

I highly recommend it. It can take some time. Like I said, this one can take maybe 15 minutes, 20 minutes, sometimes even 30 minutes if you're feeling really bad or you're really thinking lots of negative thoughts and

If it's very strong, you might need to sit down and just focus on that breathing for a good 30 minutes. But it's worth doing, because otherwise you might be stuck feeling terrible all day long.

Now, of course, again, externally, if another thing you can do once you're feeling bad, negative, you've got a bad state, is to change what's happening around you. So these techniques I just mentioned, you know, meditation, thinking of gratitude, thinking of people you love, those are kind of internal. You're doing them in your own mind.

But you can also just change your environment. Go for a walk. That's a good one. That's one of my favorites also. So I just, if I'm sitting at home and feeling...

Then I'll just go out. I'll go out somewhere nice, get around some trees, just get outdoors with the open sky. That always makes me feel better. I always feel better by doing that.

By just getting out, moving my body, fresh air, sky above me. It always, always, always makes me feel better. Maybe not 100% better, but definitely an improvement every time.

Of course, again, if you've got negative people around you, if possible, well, get away from them. Okay, it's already happened. You're not feeling good.

Get away from them. If you're on the phone with them, make an excuse. Okay, I need to go now. Sorry, bye. Get off the phone. Get away. That also helps.

And if there's some media, if you're watching some TV show or some video or you're reading something and it's making you feel bad and negative, just stop. Turn it off.

Push it away. Now finally, our third step is to arouse. To arouse means to create, to bring up positive mindsets. So the first two we talked about were preventing negative, stop, just prevent the negative from coming, and the second to change the negative.

Well, the third thing you can do is just create the positive immediately. I mean, that's also kind of a way of preventing negative, right? If you just create a positive mood and then you don't have to worry about it because the positive mood can become a good habit.

So this is a great thing to do, especially in the mornings. to make some habits so that you start immediately feeling very positive with a positive state of mind, with a positive mindset.

How can you do that? A few different ways. One are what Tony Robbins calls incantations, but which have a much older name. The older name is mantra. A mantra or an incantation

is just a word or even just a sound or a sentence that you repeat again and again and again with a lot of attention, with a lot of energy. And this should be something that's positive.

At the simplest level, perhaps the most famous mantra, which is a Hindu mantra, is Aum. You can just repeat that. You could just sit down. You could even close your eyes while you do that.

And just keep repeating that sound again and again and again for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes or more. And you might think, well, why do that? What's positive about that? Well, how is that positive?

Try it. Try it. Try it, and I think you'll see that actually there's something about that sound that is very positive. It has a kind of vibration that feels really good, especially if you use a lot of energy and you try to make the vibration happen in your head and in your neck and also down in your chest, so your full body.

Om. It feels really good physically. And mentally, because it's such a strong sound, what it does, it pushes out, really pushes everything else out. It pushes out all the negative thoughts.

It can even push out all thought in general. And if you keep doing it long enough, you're just focused on that sound. It's a kind of mindfulness. It's a kind of quite powerful meditation.

And after doing that for 5, 10, 20, 30 minutes, you'll feel really good. usually most people will feel very good after doing that. So that's perhaps the oldest and most famous mantra. Now, another kind of mantra would just be, like I said, what Tony Robbins calls them, incantations.

But it's just other people call them affirmations. That's another word, affirmations. It's just a positive sentence you say to make yourself feel good.

So you could say, You know, I feel love and gratitude every day. I feel love and gratitude every day. I feel love and gratitude every day. And just repeat that again and again and again.

You can repeat it silently in your mind, in your head, as you walk around your job and walk around the street or in your home. Or if you're at home, you could say it out loud with a very strong voice. Again and again and again, just repeating that positive sentence.

Again and again. All I need is within me now. All I need is within me now. All I need is within me now. You can even focus it on a goal. I speak English powerfully and effortlessly.

I speak English powerfully and effortlessly. I speak English powerfully and effortlessly. And you just repeat that hundreds of times maybe each day. That'll make you feel good.

That will generate, that will create positive thoughts and positive emotions, positive feelings. That same exercise I mentioned about gratitude, you can do it when you're feeling bad to feel better, but you can also just do it immediately, you know, any time to immediately create a positive mindset.

Again, this might be a good thing to do as a habit. You could make it a morning habit where you wake up in the mornings and you think of five things you're grateful for. This is like a morning habit every morning, five things I'm grateful for. Or you could do it as a bedtime ritual.

You lay down in your bed and right as you go to sleep, you again, you could think of what you're grateful for. Some people do this as a prayer, as a kind of religious thing. Thank you, God, for whatever, for my wife. Thank you, God, for my children.

Thank you, God, for my health. Thank you, God, for whatever, right? Gratitude. And that brings me to, again, to create those positive feelings. Meditation and prayer are very powerful and very, very, very, very old ways of doing this.

Those are all the internal ones. And again, External. Choose positive external environments, media, whatever. Consciously choose that to create. For example, a really easy one, a really simple one is, instead of watching movies with lots of killing, instead of watching movies,

Movies that make you feel angry. Instead of watching movies that make you feel sad, watch comedies that make you laugh. I'm doing this now. I really almost...

There's really only about two kinds of videos I watch now. I have a favorite comedy show I watch. It's like a talk show. It's these two comedians. But they're funny.

They make me laugh. Sometimes... Laughed so hard. What was it? A few days ago, they were doing, it was just this silly kind of funny jokes. But I was laughing so hard, my stomach was in pain.

It was hurting. I was like, ah! I was holding my stomach and hard to breathe. The muscles were in pain because I was laughing so hard. But of course, it felt great.

It felt great and my mood was fantastic after that. So now I'm like, you know what? In the evening, I'm not going to watch any more garbage Hollywood stuff. I'm certainly not going to watch The Lies on the fake news.

I'm going to watch these two comedians that I think are very funny. It's kind of a podcast show. They do four times per week. And so those evenings I watch.

And yeah, sometimes it's not super funny, but they're always kind of funny. And sometimes very funny. And I always feel much better, much more positive after that.

And the other thing I typically watch are like learning type videos on YouTube or something about some topic I'm interested in, which is also positive.

So you can do this too. Choose good, if you want to watch, like you're learning English and you want to watch videos or something in English, that's fine, but choose positive ones. Choose ones that make you feel good.

Don't be crazy. Don't read things and don't watch things that make you feel negative, that make you feel angry, that make you feel sad, that make you feel upset, that make you feel stressed.

Watch things that make you laugh. Watch things that make you feel curious. Watch things that make you feel good, that after you watch, you're in a better mood. You're feeling better.

Your mindset is more positive. Of course the same is true of reading. Read books that make you feel great or that make you think deeply and this is again what I've been doing myself.

This is why I'm reading the Upanishads, the major Upanishads. This is why I'm reading the Dhammapada, the Bhagavad Gita, etc. You can do that too. Choose those old great books that are

And choose the ones that are filled with positive, powerful messages. Because, of course, there are some old books that are also very depressing. Well, don't read those or don't focus on those. Focus on the old ones that are filled with goodness and wisdom and strength and inspiration.

And the same is true for music. And, of course, maybe music. Most importantly, people. People. Surround yourself with people who are very positive that make you feel good.

So that's it. You can see that it's simple. Prevent the negative states. Number two, change the negative states if they do come. And number three, create the positive states whenever possible.

And I'll give you techniques for each. And by doing this, what it is, is what you're doing is you're programming your own mind. Instead of outside people doing it, media, schools, or whatever, instead of the outside programming you and causing you to think differently,

badly and feel badly, you start to become your own programmer. The programmer of your own mind. You start to choose the feelings you want. You start to choose the thoughts you will think and focus on.

And like I said, you got to do it every day to make it a habit. Some days you'll do it and you'll feel great and some days will be tough and you'll fight and fight and they won't be great, but

But by just continuing to fight, fight, fight, you will gradually get a little more, a little more, a little more mental and emotional mastery. And then you begin to feel that you have more control over your own self, over your own mind.

And because of that, you will get more positive results in your life. You will achieve more of your goals. You will do more of what you want to do. You'll feel more how you want to feel.

You'll get more of what you want to get. Managing your state of mind is incredibly important. Learning how to have that mental discipline, that mental mastery, that emotional mastery, so, so, so important. Maybe this is the most important skill in life.

Mastering yourself. This is the skill that will help you learn and master any other skill. When you master yourself, then you are in a great position to master anything else.

Master spoken English. Speak English powerfully and fluently. Think in English. Speak English effortlessly. I train you to do this in my VIP program. Join my VIP program today.

Commit. Commit. Again, it's something you do each day. You keep fighting each day, each day, and you will get better and better. You will get those results speaking effortlessly, powerfully, fluently.

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