Training your mind. Just hearing the words would make someone uncomfortable. Others may give it a thought but leave it. It does sound strange.

And that’s quiet alright. You see we don’t know much about our minds. We are getting to know only the tip of the ice berg as far as how we think and why we think what we think.

Yet it’s the most basic and fundamental thing which we keep on doing every single day. Day in and day out. Think about it. A baby starts to learn from the moment it arrives in this world. Slowly from crawling to walking to talking. It learns a lot of things. Even before the baby learns to talk, things can be and are taught. Once language comes into play the process of learning gets on the fast track. He continues to be on the information super highway moving in a Ferrari till he reaches youth.

After a certain time, this starts to slow down. Things get monotonous. New things are not learnt. New things are now only read in the newspaper or heard in the news. Once this happens, there is no excitement in our lives.  How then can we train our minds?

Training our minds is very similar to training our body. Just as we hit the gym to train our body we can use techniques and methods to train our minds. Training our body has immediate physical results which is not the case with our minds. Hence it may seem a bit alien concept to us.

I can compare mind training to body training since I am into being physically fit and regularly hit the gym. So as with any work out we start with some Warm ups. Games like sudoko, chess, mind bender can start our mind juices flowing. Incidentally, some physical movements like spot jumping also propels our brain to start focusing better. Here the most important aspect is to get our minds into a state of readiness. Kind of like a reflex action game. This is also important so that we don’t over tax our minds from the word go. Keep it simple. Then increase the difficulty.

There is a concept in gyming. Progressive overload. We have to increase the weight we are lifting over a period of time to make sure that we break down the muscle. Otherwise, the muscles will get used to the weight and no growth will happen.

Similarly, treating our brains also as a muscle, we have to start making challenges difficult. Over time we will be able to solve more difficult puzzles and situation. We will be able to improve our brain power. This a exactly what we can achieve from a NLP session. Ways to make our minds work for us. Be it a sad memory. A traumatic past. Or a fear. After knowing how to talk to our minds and with the right training we can go past these hurdles. Once we know how this is done, the same technique can be applied to every aspect of life. From career to relationships. From friendship to phobia. All are now a piece of cake for our minds. And the results are amazing.

Cool Down. Same as with relaxing our muscles to avoid injury, we practice meditation and happy thinking to relax our minds. Sleep also forms a important part of relaxing the minds.

All these done correctly under supervision can bring in the change that we always wanted. And that is how we train our minds.

Esther Indurkar
August 2019