So is there a propensity to adapt positive self-talk? Is it easier when you're younger, just like picking up a language? It doesn't make any difference how old you are. Because of neuroplasticity, that's the brain's ability to rewire itself and to change. We used to think that the brain only changed or got continued to wire itself in while we were small or young, into our teenage years or just beyond that.

What we discovered later on was that neuroplasticity or the rewiring process never stops. So an infant is wiring its brain all the time, and an older person is wiring his or her brain all the time. And so it doesn't make any difference what age we are.

What makes a difference is the amount of repetition those messages get. Wow. One way I like to look at this, and it makes it really clear, one of my favorite places in the world is the newborn nursery, the infant nursery in the hospital.

And I've had the opportunity to visit the infant nursery a number of times. And when you visit the newborn nursery and you're there to see these little infants, brand new to life, just been born, and we stand on one side in the hospital, we stand on one side of a viewing window, and then we look through the window, and there on the other side of the window in their little bassinets are these beautiful miracles of life. They're snuggled into their little swaddling clothes in their bassinet.

And if they're awake, you can actually see them. Their eyes are open. It's as though they're searching to live out that incredible potential they were born with.

And then that little infant, they get their first message. It's very possibly the first series of messages is from the mother, their loving messages. Those start to get recorded by the infant's brain.

But there's probably in the room at the hospital that the mother is resting in, there's probably also a television set up in the corner, and it's on, and that's delivering messages, and then the child is taken home, and then the brothers and sisters, the family, the world around that child, once an infant, now growing, the world is constantly and continually programming that child, and that's how we grow. Picture this. This brings it all home.

Think of, and anyone listening or watching right now can do this. Think of someone you know who you would consider to be the most successful person you know or know of. And I don't mean just financially.

I mean successful in life, so that person's life would be spiraling upward. Life is working. And then get a clear picture of that person.

It can be somebody who's still with us or not, but get a picture of that person in your mind, and then we'll ask that person to, and imagine this, that that person is in the room with you now and standing off to the right of you. And then while that person is standing there, very successful in life, life is working. Imagine exactly the opposite.

So that would be somebody who's failing really badly. This could be somebody you know or know of. When I think of that, I still think of this about 17-year-old kid who left home when he was 17.

His parents haven't seen him since because if they found him today, I suspect they'd find him in an alley someplace, and he probably wouldn't even recognize his parents because of the amount of drugs in his system. But that's just who comes to my mind when I think of someone who's failing. But if you're listening right now, just get a picture of someone that you know or know of who's failing in life, spiraling downward, maybe trying to get better, but struggling and failing.

And then once you have a clear picture of that person, ask that person to come in the room with you also, and we'll have that person stand over on the other side. And so now here you are. There are two people who are very different.

One of them is successful. Life is working. The other one is troubled and very unsuccessful, and life clearly is not working.

And you look at those two people and ask yourself the question, what is the difference? Why is one person doing well at life? Life is working, and why is the other person failing? And the answer actually is their programs. In fact, what is absolutely profound to me is that those two individuals that we're watching right now, those two individuals could have been the little infants that we looked at in the newborn nursery just a few minutes ago. And there they were, and they had just been born, and they were miracles of life.

And their eyes were wide open, and they were waiting to to searching to live out that opportunity, and then one went one way and one went another. And that's a clear picture of what actually happens. And what I find so reassuring in that picture is that neuroscience tells us that what actually took these individuals on their different paths was programming from the outside, and then we become our number one programmer, and that's our self-talk.

So that's why self-talk is so vitally important, and it's so much more than just somebody walking down the street talking to himself. Okay, so you mentioned neuroplasticity and repetition in there. So if we as adults now we realize that we're in control of this, right, and I think that's a big first step.

We have to realize that we can change. How do we go about using self-talk to trigger the neuroplasticity to make the changes in our wiring so that we become the person we want to? Let's just take a good-to-great example. There are many people who are listening, Dr. Shad, right now, and they have, I view it like a thermometer, or I'm sorry, a thermostat.

They have their thermostat set at a certain level of success, and they believe that that's who they are. How do we break through that level of success and go from being a, you know, I used to say when I went into sales, I went from one job to another, and I was like a $150,000 a year salesperson in one role, and then I joined a company, and the company said, you have to sell a million dollars worth of our services each year in order to remain employed. Well, you know what happened, Dr. Shad? I went from being a $150,000 a year salesperson to being a million dollar a year salesperson pretty quick, and that company reset my, you know, my thermostat to from 150 to a million, and then when they said, hey, if you want to be the best, Dave, here's how much the best sell.

Well, the next year I said, well, if I can go from 150 to a million, I can certainly go from a million to 20 million, and guess what? I reset that thermostat again, but I don't know how I did it, so how do, you know, I told myself, I guess I was somebody who was at this level. How do we break through that programming that we have in our head? Well, it's very likely that many or most of the people listening to this right now have got a lot of programs that are really good, that are working for them. You clearly, I you got programs that worked, and then we tend to build on the programs that are strongest, because we attract more messages of the same kind, so perhaps in that way you were fortunate, but most of the people listening, because they're listening, have some really good programs already, and they're overcoming that the early obstacle, which is, well, there's a one estimate, which I believe, that says that as much as 77% of all of the programs we got, if we grew up in a reasonably positive home, as much as 77% of those programs are still negative, or counterproductive, or work against us.

A wonderful estimate is that during the first 18 years of your life, if you grew up in a reasonably positive home, you and I were told no, or what we could not do, or what wouldn't work, more than 148,000 times, and that might even be a lower number, because a lot of the messages we got weren't said directly to us. They were through life experiences, but what happens is those people who get enough good messages early on can easily, can listen to what we're saying and say, that makes sense, so if all of the programs I got are wired into my brain through repetition, that would make sense then that I could wire more of those same kinds of programs into my brain through more repetition, so that's where we're starting. You start with awareness.

Next, the steps that the Self Talk Institute recommends, and I like these steps, the next step is monitor. Just start monitoring for the next 30 days, set a goal, make a choice to listen to everything you say out loud, and also, we're not in the habit of doing this much, but listen to everything you're thinking. It would be like if you had someone go around with you for the next 30 days, and they wrote down every single thing that you said.

Now, they couldn't write down your thoughts, but at least they could write down everything you said, and then at the end of that 30 days, you had them type up a manuscript of everything that you had said, and then you asked them to circle with a yellow highlighter, circle everything you said repeatedly, and then you just read at the end of 30 days, you just read everything that was underlined or circled, and you would see an absolute perfect picture of your Self Talk, of your programs as they are today. So, listening to yourself is a habit that most of us aren't used to, but it is one that if you set some daily reminders and remind yourself during the day to be aware, within a matter of days, you begin to start to notice everything you're saying, and then after that, the habit starts to step in, and then you're consciously aware of what's going on, and you're consciously aware of what's going in, so what's being programmed into your brain. So, that's monitoring.

Step three is to edit. Every one of us has the ability to immediately change anything we were about to think or say and turn it into the opposite, turn it the other way around. Someone can say for years something like, I can never remember names, I have the world's worst memory, and they say that to themselves for 37 years, and then they go to an event, and they meet someone new, and they're impressed, and they want to remember this person's name, and then they're introduced, they get the name, and then seven-tenths of a second, the name is gone, and they're trying to go through the alphabet, trying to remember what that person's name was, and their subconscious mind is saying, see, I did what you told me.

You've been telling me for 37 years, I can't remember names. I did it. So, what happens is we end up flying on autopilot.

As much as 90 percent or more of all of our programs are completely hidden from us. We have no idea what they are, and so those are the programs that are actually flying our plane. They're sending us in the direction that those programs tell us to go in, and it would be like if you got on an airplane, and you wanted to go to Florida, but all of the airplanes on board, the airplanes on board computer, all of the programs were told that airplane to go to Alaska or a different direction.

You wouldn't get to Florida, and that really is, although it sounds so simple, it's very complex in the brain, but that is really what the brain is doing. It's sending us in the direction that 90 percent of our programs or more are designed to send us, even if those programs are the wrong programs. So, when you start to edit, what you're doing is you're saying, okay, I'm taking responsibility for my own programming.

From here on out, it's not going to be the people around me. It's not going to be my old casual self-talk that I wasn't aware of. It's not going to be television or the media or social media.

It's going to be me. I take responsibility for my own programs, and the more you edit, the more you begin to rewrite the programs that you have stored in your brain. Then the next step is to listen.

A lot of people listen to self-talk. I've been writing professionally recorded self-talk sessions for many, many years on a broad variety of subjects, and many people listen to self-talk. The reason I started doing that was because that's how I began to learn my second language.

That's how I started to learn foreign languages, was by listening to them, and the brain is designed to do that. Then the next step, and perhaps the most important, is to practice. Once you develop the habit of practicing to wire your brain the way you want it to be, once you develop that habit, you're really off and running.

Then the old programs you have that are good will build. They'll get stronger because every time a program is used again, it's actually being fed nutrition, so it gets stronger and stronger. Then as you begin following the new programs, then the old programs fall into disuse.

There's only so much room for a fixed amount of wiring in the brain, so the brain will get rid of old wiring, old programs that it's no longer using. They actually call it pruning, just like pruning a rose bush or something. So the brain will begin to prune out the old programs.

So what it all gets down to is, I think the easiest way to describe it is, make the choice to learn the language of success. If you think in that new language with the new programs, the positive new programs, if you learn to think in that language, you're not just trying to be successful in one area or another area. You're actually being that person who thinks and lives in a more successful way.

That's really important.