CONVERSATIONS WITH
JOSH RITCHER CONTINUED
was happening to me. At its peak, when the startup was
crashing down around me, I found myself on the sixth floor
of a parking garage ready to leap, but I walked away and
checked myself into rehab. It was here that I realized I could
actually watch my thought patterns and course correct. This
awareness ignited my curiosity.
P: What makes your method different from the other,
more traditional self-help methods mentioned in Ship
for Brains?
R: One of the big ones is repetition. Your brain automates
repetitive things so that you don’t have to consciously think
about them, because conscious thoughts take up a lot of
energy. So, if you think a conscious thought for enough days in
a row, your brain will see a pattern and say, “rather than using
all this energy, let’s automate it and conserve energy.” We
might as well use that to our advantage, right? I tried this first
with the word “should”. Should was a negative word I used
against myself for many years. “I should have seen that
coming, I should have done this, I should do this in the
future.” I used the word should against myself constantly, so I
decided to eradicate it from my vocabulary and change it to the
word “could”. Could is a much kinder word: “I could have
done that, but I didn’t and that’s okay.” For about a month,
when I said the word “should,” I would rephrase the sentence
with the word “could.” Over time it became automatic, and I
stopped saying “should”—the brain took over, the word
“could” had been inserted and “should” erased.
“My mission is to wake up others to their
own power and to teach people about the
ultimate control they have.”
50
PULSE
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December 2018