How to Hack Your Mind with Sir John Hargrave
Overcoming your fears can be as easy as hacking your mind.
Sir John Hargrave is the author of Mind Hacking, a book about how you can rewrite the way your mind works. You can give yourself hope when you need it, courage when you need it, and dream bigger than you ever thought possible.
 Here are a few highlights from my recent conversation with him:
Your Brain Can Be Reprogrammed Like a Computer
Computers were designed to function as close to the human brain’s “operating system” as possible, so they would be easier to use by humans. But what would happen if we tried to use the way we program computers on our own brains—to make them do what we want? They’d fall into line! How do you program your brain, though?
If You Pay Attention, Your Brain Will Tell You What to Fix
Search for negative thoughts to fix.
Everyone has thoughts that feel bad. But when we don’t have negative thoughts that makes us feel bad we feel … well, good! So how do we get rid of those thoughts, or the negativity?
The first step is to look for the negative thoughts. Anywhere you’re having a persistent thought that makes you feel bad, you want to focus in. Try and hack in and “debug” the negativity by working on each thought as it come up.
You can find these negative thoughts to debug by looking for “I” statements in your thinking. For example, say your boss just gave you a one hundred reports to write. You think, “I hate my boss.” That’s something to hack and debug. Your boss may be a terrible judge of assignment size, but that doesn’t mean YOU have to feel angry about it.
Another way to find what to fix is to … think!
Think About Your Mind
A simple way to hack your brain is to just think about your mind. By taking a moment each day to focus on what’s inside, anyone can get more control of their brain. But by specifically thinking about what’s going in there, and how to change it, you can make some pretty effective adjustments to your thinking.Â
One trick is to ask, “What was my mind just thinking?” Your boss just gave you the reports. In that moment, stop and think about your mind. Ask what your mind was just thinking, and chances are, you’ll come up with the phrase, “I hate my boss.” Now, you’ve figured out what to work on.Â
But what are some ways you can work on what you find to hack?
Use The Five Why’s to Find Out Where to Start
One technique to deal is the “five why’s” idea. This is a trick, which was originally used in manufacturing cars to trace a problem to the root, and figure out how to fix it.Â
Now that you’ve figured out that “I hate my boss,” is what you want to work on, ask “why?” Why do you hate your boss? Because she gives you too many assignments. Why does she give you too many assignments? Maybe because she doesn’t know not to. Why doesn’t she know not to? Because you never talked with her about how many assignments you could handle. Look! You got to the heart of the matter before you even asked “why” five times. Now you know you can go talk to your boss about easing your workload, so you’re less stressed out!
Write It Down to Make It Stick
One piece of hacking your own mind is making patterns of thinking a certain way, or just habits you want to internalize, stick well. Make the hack you do on your mind stick by repeating it. Write down the thing you want to succeed/change, and just repeat the behavior you want every time. Writing down the things you want to accomplish in life, and in your brain, helps, too. Stick with five big goals that are actionable and achievable so you can remember them and write them down EVERY day.
There’s a lot more to the interview with Sir John. We discuss reality distortion fields, achieving the impossible, mental rehearsal, and how to join the free, online mind-hacking community at www.mindhacki.ng.
Listen to my interview with Sir John Hargrave in the top right hand player of this page, or on iTunes and Stitcher. You can also watch an extended video interview here.
I’m Stever Robbins. I run webinars and seminars to you be Extraordinarily Productive. If you want to know more, visit SteverRobbins.com
Work Less, Do More, and Have a Great Life!
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.Â
