Daily Dose of English 103
Personal Mantras
Daily Dose of English 103
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to, excuse me, we're going to be talking about personal mantras or mantras. Both pronunciations are used and are acceptable. I say mantras more, but. There are a bunch of words in American English, specifically, that have multiple pronunciations that are totally fine. It's more about a matter of personal preference. Across the entire English-speaking world, there are hundreds of these words, but there are a few notable ones, like mantra, mantra, either, either, then neither, neither, aunt, aunt. All of these are totally acceptable pronunciations in pretty much any part of the US. There are general patterns of who uses it where, but now because of the internet, it's not, and they're not super common words, so it's more likely that you say what, or rather, that was not a very well-formed thought. They're not very rare words, shoot. They are very rare words, which means that you're less likely to imitate what people around you say because you don't hear them that much. And so you usually say what you hear mostly, and if you hear those words mostly online, then where you're from doesn't affect it as much. The main difference for that is, well, actually, wait, that's not a good, that's good for mantra mantra, but it's not great for aunt, aunt, either, either, neither, neither, but whatever. That's not the point of this episode. but there are more rare ones. That's what I was thinking of. I gave bad examples though, that's my bad. I'm sure I can end up coming up with more of rare examples, but I wanna get into the actual topic of this episode, which is personal mantras. So first, what is a mantra? A mantra is very much like a motto or a phrase that describes a person. usually what somebody's trying to do or to think. And a mantra specifically is something that is repeated, usually. And so a personal mantra is a sentence or a phrase that you might repeat for yourself for some reason. And a mantra is used in things like meditation or various yoga practices, just mindfulness. There's a lot of reasons you might use a mantra. Maybe when you're doing sports or going to the gym, lots of different reasons you might use a mantra. But then a personal mantra is something that you have for yourself. because it's personal, right? It's personalized to you. There are plenty of mantras out there that you can just find that are like made that are kind of generic and helpful for maybe something. They usually have to do with changing your mindset or helping you remember something about whatever, doing something. And they're usually used as a personal development tool of some way to help you to understand things better, understand yourself better, that sort of thing. But I wanted to talk about them today because I have found simple personal mantras to be really helpful. Because like using them too often is a little kind of, I don't think that great, but there are certain things that you want to improve and train, especially when you're trying to learn a language. Discipline is really important and personal mantras can be really, really helpful. And actually there's a, really good video on YouTube in English, which is great, called Discipline is a, wait, what is it called? Discipline is an Emotion. Yeah, Discipline is an Emotion, something like that. Discipline is an Emotion. Let me just make sure that's correct. Yes, Discipline is actually an Emotion is, what you can search and you can find a video a little bit more about this where I originally learned about sort of this idea of repeating something that you want to do in a way that will help you to feel that emotion. And I've sort of taken other sources as well and learned a little bit more about this. So it's not just that one source, but that's where I originally sort of started thinking about this. And the main idea with the personal mantra is to help train yourself to do things more easily. Willpower is something that is finite. Finite means that you can run out of it. It can go to zero. And so you only have a certain amount of willpower. It's sort of like gasoline in a car or water in a bottle. If you drink all the water, it's gone. You're out of it. Willpower is the same. And you slowly have your willpower being built up. And discipline is sort of related. Discipline is a way to Almost, if we're going back to that bottle analogy, so you have water in a bottle and it's very slowly filling up. There's a couple of drops every second. Drop, drop, drop, right? So you don't have, it's not filling very quickly, but you can drink it very fast. If you want, you can drink your entire bottle in one second or okay, maybe not that fast, but very fast. And if there's more holes in your bottle, the faster you're going to lose water. And so discipline in a lot of ways is like patching those holes or fixing the bottle to be sealed and airtight so that you don't really lose willpower as easily. There's more to it and thinking of it in a lot of different ways might be helpful, but this is how it's helpful for me to think about. And so your discipline is having a perfectly sealed bottle that really doesn't lose additional water. That's very difficult to do. We're all humans. We're all gonna have things that we want or do things. And so throughout the day, we use up our willpower regardless, even if we have a really good discipline or no discipline. However, the rate, how much we use is sort of dependent on your discipline. And so going to an example that is pretty common is junk food. A lot of people really struggle with junk food. And they can't stop themselves from eating candy or chocolates if it's there in the house or if it's close to them. It just uses up all their willpower. They have no more willpower and they just do it. And they lose that battle, so to speak. They didn't want to, really. Inside their head, they were thinking, I don't really want this, but oh God, I want it so bad. And so that's a negative thing. If they did want that and they don't really have another, like they do want that thing, that's fine. But I'm talking about the case where you don't want to do something that you end up doing as kind of by accident rather. And so this personal mantra can really help you to maybe not patch up holes, but learn how to cover holes better or how to patch up holes better. and so that you don't end up using as much willpower. So for somebody who just doesn't wanna eat sweets or candy, but they haven't really thought about it much, they're gonna have to spend a lot of willpower to not eat some candy that's in front of them. But somebody who's been using a personal mantra of, I don't want to eat candy, it's not something that will make me happy. I don't wanna eat candy, it's not something that'll make me happy. I don't wanna eat candy, it's not something that'll make me happy. When they see a piece of candy, they won't think, ooh, that looks really good. They'll more rather think, oh, I don't wanna eat candy. It's not something that'll make me happy. And it maybe doesn't solve the problem immediately, right? This isn't a magic solution, but having that mantra ready in your mind and something that you're aware of can be really powerful for reminding yourself why you're doing something or to help you to make a better decision without really using much willpower. And so it's a pretty nice solution. Anyways, I think I've explained this okay. I don't know. You have to tell me in the comments how it went if you understood what the hell I'm talking about. But I have used mantras in the past and one of the ones I actually used was about discipline because I'm a person with relatively trained discipline at this point. I can do the same thing every single day. It's how I've gotten to 103 episodes on this podcast and all these different things, but it's not easy. It's not like it's just something that I do without thinking and it's whatever, it's perfect. And so for a couple of months, my mantra was my discipline is a superpower. My discipline is a superpower. And that especially was helpful in the mornings when I didn't want to wake up at 6 a.m. I would wake up and I would look at the ceiling and I would say, I don't want to get out of bed. I am not ready to get out of bed. And then reminding myself, oh, yeah, discipline is my superpower was very, very helpful because I would be like, OK, well, I want to have a superpower. Right. So I better be disciplined. And so it's this helpful trick to increase this discipline emotion, which then makes it easier to do the things and get on with stuff. Another useful mantra is to remind yourself what the consequences of something are. So actually, for example, with getting up early, if you get up at 6 a.m., you are tired for 15, 20 minutes, but then later on in the day, you feel pretty normal. You're fine. And so reminding yourself that can be nice because in the morning you're like, oh God, I'm so tired. But then if you go, well, I'll be okay in an hour, right? I'm always okay in an hour. That can be also very powerful. So anyways, I want to encourage you if you're having trouble doing something regularly or building a habit of something, try making a little mantra that reminds you of why simply in one single sentence that you can say quickly and easily inside your head to help you to be more aware of that thing. And let me know how it goes. I'm curious to see your experience down in the comments. But that's everything that I have for this episode. Sorry that it was a little bit rambly, but you know, that's what happens sometimes. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you again tomorrow. Bye bye.
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