My mother was a cynical old soul. One day she and I were having a conversation with someone who said something to the effect of, “I was raised in the Presbyterian Church, my parents were very devout, but I’m now a confirmed atheist.”
As he walked away, my mother gestured toward him with her thumb, rolled her eyes a little, and said to me under her breath, “Yeah, but when he dies, he’ll want a priest.”
Her religious spoonerisms aside, it’s important to remember that a great deal of information gets into our subconscious minds, much of it not by our choice, and it can be very hard to overcome it in moments of great stress. The most ridiculous ideas will start to function as facts if they are repeated often enough. This is why change, either personal or organizational, can be so hard. The old mantras resist it, as they are more reliant upon repetition than on logic.
I would like to stretch the meaning of the word mantra here, to be any word or phrase that is commonly repeated. Every culture has mantras. Every religion has mantras. Every community has mantras. These can be slogans, anthems, catchphrases, you name it. It’s not enough for Nike to say “just do it” one single time. No. They pay millions of dollars to insert it into our daily visual experience, over and over and over again.
The famous success book “Think and Grow Rich” places great emphasis on the power of what that book calls “autosuggestion.” This is the act of repeatedly stating and meditating on a given goal, for the purpose of literally hypnotizing yourself into moving towards it on a subconscious level. This is a form of a mantra. Your subconscious mind requires a great deal of repetition to comprehend and accept most things. But once it finally “gets it,” your instructions to it become self-perpetuating, even compulsive.
I discovered the power of repetitive autosuggestion when I got serious about playing the double bass. In high school, I had never really delved into training my deep subconscious, and I never got any better. Then, for three months, for eight hours a day, I did nothing but play scales and arpeggios. It was that endless dull repetition that finally “got through my thick skull” and transformed me into a serious player. After all that slow dull repetition, playing the bass part to a Beethoven symphony was no more difficult for me than reciting the alphabet is for you.
So, let’s be pragmatic and realize that we all live in a massive soup of other people’s mantras. Whatever music, comedy, sports, drama, or news you consume, embedded within that stream of information are all sorts of repeated phrases designed to overcome your independent thinking by doing an end-run around your conscious mind. It’s in both the content and the advertising.
So here is my coaching tip du jour: develop your own mantras. To get you started, I will share some of my own mantra creations. Some of my favorites are, “I love everybody, and everybody loves me.” Another one is “I have power and permission.”
You are of course free to borrow these if you like, but I really think you should create mantras that are custom-designed for you, ones that will counterbalance the negative elements of the “tapes” of your environment or your family system.
Now bear in mind, the real key here is excessive repetition. When you repeat a phrase 200 times a day every day, it starts to affect your subconscious emotional flow. After a while, this planned-by-you attitude and expectation will start to become automatic. This is “managing your mantras.”
If one of your parents said something to you just 10 times a day for 18 years, that’s over 61,000 repetitions of a thought, belief, or presumption. That is a big external mantra imposition, one that you did not choose. If you were lucky, your parents gave you good mantras. If they gave you lousy ones, you can replace them with ones of your own design.
Along with verbal mantras, you can also create visual mantras. When I was a young ambitious but not yet professional bass player, I posted a little note on my practice room wall. It read, simply, “greatest bass player in the world.” I did in fact become a pretty good professional player, although I never had a shot at being anything like Gary Karr or Ed Barker. But 20 years ago, I made a little recording for Bose Corporation which, for a while, they put on one of their demo CDs that shipped with every one of their CD players. I was heard by at least 100,000 people, probably more. So if you define “greatest bass player” as the solo bass player heard by the largest number of people, I did in fact achieve that goal.
This is the power of mantras. They will take you to places that you can’t really imagine right now. They engage the infinite power of the subconscious mind.
Again, it’s very important to do this, because we live in a massive online morass of other people’s attempts to manipulate you with their mantras. Take charge. During your commute, while you’re taking a shower, while you’re walking on the treadmill, take 15 minutes a day to design, manage, and execute your own mantras.
That’s my holistic management coaching tip of the day! – JL
