DURING World War II, Ted Bengermino was responsible for maintaining records of men killed or missing in action. He often had to take the personal effects of soldiers killed in action and send the things to the young men’s parents, and he worried himself sick that his department might make a mistake. What if they accidentally told the wrong parents their son was dead?

Bengermino was anxious so often, he started worrying about his own health. He lost thirty-four pounds from worry and exhaustion. He worried he might be a physical wreck when he went home after the war. He cried when he was alone. “There was a period soon after the Battle of the Bulge started,” he said, “that I gave up hope of ever being a normal human being again.”

He eventually ended up in the Army dispensary. The doctor examined Ted and concluded his problem was mental. “Ted,” he said, “I want you to think of your life as an hourglass…”

The doctor explained the basic truth: We all want to do more in a day than can be done. But we’ve got to take the tasks one at a time. If we don’t, it would be like trying to force the grains of sand through the narrow part of the hourglass. We would break under the strain.

The advice of the doctor was Ted’s turning point. He often said to himself, “One grain of sand at a time…One task at a time.” That became his slotra. He practiced thinking it. And he began to recover.

After the war, working for a printing company, he sometimes felt pressure and he became anxious and tense. The slotra would come into his mind, “One grain of sand at a time. One task at a time.”

“By repeating those words to myself over and over,” he said, “I accomplished my tasks in a more efficient manner and I did my work without the confused and jumbled feeling that had almost wrecked me on the battlefield.”

When you want to make a change in your life, remember that the key is remembering to think something specific at specific times. To ingrain a thought, make a slotra and repeat it. It’s the power tool for change.

REMIND YOURSELF

Miki has been shy her whole life. She feels anxious around people, especially when she feels she’s being watched or judged. She feels strongly compelled to make sure people don’t disapprove of her. She tries to please everybody and in doing so, she limits her self-expression. She doesn’t feel free to be herself. She feels she must make sure everybody is pleased with her.

One day she realizes it’s okay if every person is not a hundred percent pleased with her. In fact, it’s impossible. She can’t please everybody. And she’s no longer willing to sacrifice her own integrity and honesty to make shallow people more comfortable.

That’s a great insight. Will it make any difference? It could. But tomorrow, when Miki is talking to her father, the old patterns will be there very strongly. She may forget all about her insight.

There is one technique that can preserve her insight: She will need to remind herself. Not by writing it in a journal that she may not read until three years from now. Not by thinking about it once or twice. But by taking on the task of reminding herself like it is important. How can she remind herself in a way that she cannot ignore or overlook?

This is our task also. We have insights all the time. Will they make any difference? It depends on how successfully we remind ourselves. Of course, you have to be selective. Some of the things you learn aren’t worth taking the time to ingrain. But when you find one, take the task seriously and do it wholeheartedly. Don’t let that insight fade away. Make it real. Let it change your life for the better.

Put the insight on your screensaver. Write it on a card and keep it in your pocket. Pull it out and look at it several times a day. Post it on your dashboard, on the refrigerator, on the bathroom mirror. Have it engraved on a pendant and wear it. Record it onto a tape and listen to it while you drive. And I’m not talking about doing one of these, like some sort of gesture. I mean do them all and anything else you can think of. Get serious about remembering your insights!

And here’s a hot tip: Your brain stops looking at stationary things. If Miki put a giant poster on her wall that says: “It’s okay if every person is not a hundred percent pleased with you,” even if the letters are six feet high, within a couple weeks she won’t notice the poster any more. Her brain will get used to seeing it. Her brain already knows what the poster says and will stop registering it.

That means if you post something on your bathroom mirror, you’ll have to move it to another location after a couple days or you will stop noticing it. Or you can ask your spouse to move it for you. Use your ingenuity to come up with novel ways to remind you of the insight.

I remembered to unroll the sleeves the first day I tried, because my decision was fresh in my mind. But then for three days I forgot. Then I reminded myself, and started concentrating on reminding myself, and did it for two days. Then I forgot for a few more. Eventually I formed a new habit. Now I’ve unrolled those shirtsleeves so many times, it would be difficult to remember to leave them rolled up.

You know how it is. There are lots of things we do automatically like that. We’ve done them so many times, the sequence of movements doesn’t require our attention, so our attention goes to other things while we do it.

For most people, driving a car is like that, which is amazing because driving a car is a complex activity, which anyone first learning to drive is painfully aware of. You have to pay attention to the road, other cars, signs, turns, etc., and move the steering wheel and foot-pedals in response to what you see. There’s a lot going on. A lot to remember.

But after driving for a few years, most people can do it all without really paying attention. When something unusual happens, you “wake up” and put your attention on the road, almost as if you took over the manual control of a car driving on “automatic pilot.”

If driving conditions are normal, an experienced driver can engage in a conversation with a passenger while the automatic pilot watches and responds to the driving situation. Amazing!

That amazing level of automatic behavior was created just by doing something many times.

But there are some things you’ve done even more often than driving, like tying your shoes. And thinking.

Have you ever seen a child learn to tie his shoes? You’ve forgotten what a complex task it is. You’ve done it thousands of times. If you tried to tie your shoes a different way now, you’d have a hard time. Each one of your movements is a cue or a trigger for the next movement in the sequence, and each has been linked together again and again. It’s a habit. It happens automatically. And when you’re doing it, you don’t really pay attention to the task. If you tried doing it differently you would have to work on it and it wouldn’t be easy.

It’s the same way with your thoughts. You’ve had some sequences of thoughts thousands of times, often triggered by the same or similar events.

For example, when someone you love has an unhappy look on her/his face, it triggers a sequence of thoughts. You’ve gone through the sequence of thoughts so many times, you aren’t even aware of them any more. All you know is the end result: You feel bad. You may have gone through that same sequence of thoughts since you first began to think.

When you were a child and your parents gave you that look, you first formed your sequence of thoughts, however primitive they were back then. Those thought-patterns may have been the first complex thoughts you ever had. And if you’ve never stopped and changed those patterns, you’ve been going through the same patterns over and over almost your entire life, having the same feelings in response to those same facial expressions.

Then I come along and tell you to pay attention to what you’re thinking. But by the time you feel a negative emotion, you’ve already gone through the sequence of thoughts that got you there. And you did it so quickly, you didn’t even know you were thinking. I had a hard enough time becoming aware enough to remember to unroll my shirtsleeves. It’s far more difficult to become aware of your thinking when you feel bad.

But while it’s true your habits can get you into trouble sometimes, habits are also tremendously useful. Habits are not the enemy. Habits are how you hold onto patterns, useful or not. If you weren’t able to form habits, life would be much more difficult.

The fact that you can form habits and that those habits are resistant to change is good because when you have a useful sequence of thoughts or actions, you won't have to try to remember every time. You can relax and put your attention on other things.

Because habits are hard to break, you can gain something. It’s like a ratchet. It allows you to move forward, but prevents you from slipping back. So you can get somewhere. You can improve.

The only catch is when you need to change a habit that already exists.

BLAZING A NEW PATH

A habit or thought pattern is like a well-worn path through a large meadow. If you’re going to cross this meadow, the easiest way to do it is by following the path.

But let’s say the path takes you to a swamp, and that’s not where you want to go anymore. There are berry bushes in a corner of the meadow, and that’s what you want.

The only problem is, there is no path to the berry bushes and the grass in the meadow is four feet high and hard to walk through.

Obviously, the thing you need to do is to make a new path. It will be hard. It will be a lot harder than going down the well-worn path to the swamp. But if you want to form a new path, that’s what you need to do.