Build the teaching into 30 days of structured daily practice.
30-Day Challenge Workbook
How The Mind Works
Apply the Teaching
30-Day Challenge Workbook for How The Mind Works
How The Mind Works - 30-Day Challenge Workbook
Build Larson's law of substitution into a daily habit - 30 structured days of practising deliberate thought replacement with modern CBT techniques for rewiring persistent patterns.
How The Mind Works - 30-Day Digital Workbook
All 30 days of mental habit and thought substitution practice designed for GoodNotes, Notability, and any PDF app. No printing needed.
How The Mind Works - 30-Day Fillable Workbook
The full 30-day thought substitution programme with fillable form fields - type directly in any PDF reader, no printing required, no app needed.
Inside the Workbook
30 days through every section of How The Mind Works
Chapter I
Establishes the subconscious mind as an active, creative reservoir of limitless power that can be entirely governed and directed by conscious mental impressions.
Chapter II
The mind achieves highest efficiency when maintained in a poised, metaphysical attitude that prevents mental energy from being wasted on chaotic, reactive thoughts.
Chapter III
All mental activity is determined by the desires we entertain and the suggestions we allow to enter the mental system. A protective barrier of conscious attention filters what gets impressed.
Chapter IV
Focusing exclusively on the ideal, the perfect, and the absolute structures the mind's creative forces toward positive development.
Chapter V
A person's habitual thought patterns directly determine their physical body, character traits, and external life circumstances.
Chapter VI
Mental imagery held with deep subjective feeling serves as an absolute pattern for the subconscious creative energies to replicate in physical experience.
Chapter VII
Systematic concentration increases the flow of life force and vital energy to specific brain centres, thereby expanding cognitive capacity.
Chapter VIII
The internal subjective state is always the cause; the external objective environment is merely the effect. True change begins inside.
Chapter IX
Cultivating specific, high-quality mental talents naturally attracts matching external opportunities and positions.
Chapter X
Maintaining internal harmony and joy causes all external events and relationships to work together constructively rather than as obstacles.
Chapter XI
The quality and intensity of thoughts projected outward directly govern the quality of experiences returned to the individual.
Chapter XII
The mind must be consciously nourished with positive ideas, clean mental impressions, and healthy environmental inputs to support cognitive growth.
Chapter XIII
Shifting from random, reactive thinking to designed, purposeful thinking allows the individual to transcend ordinary intellectual limits.
Chapter XIV
The Master Mind is achieved when conscious direction and subconscious creative power work in perfect, harmonious collaboration.
Chapter XV
Conscious mental directives, held with deep conviction, can directly enhance physical health and cellular vitality.
Chapter XVI
Individuals can consciously shape their future by mastering the mental causes that dictate environmental outcomes.
Chapter XVII
Cultivating intuitive perception allows the individual to look past physical appearances to grasp the latent goodness and potential in all people and situations.
Chapter XVIII
Expanding individual consciousness allows the mind to handle complex intellectual and practical challenges with ease rather than strain.
Chapter XIX
Aligning individual consciousness with the infinite, universal creative mind unlocks the highest levels of creative power.
Chapter XX
Living continuously in a state of high spiritual awareness allows the individual to experience permanent peace, harmony, and joy.
The Method
Reading the book and doing the work are not the same thing
Most people read Larson's work, agree with it entirely, and then continue doing what they have always done. The gap is not understanding - it is practice. Understanding what the mind needs and consistently doing the work to give it that are two different capacities, and only one of them produces change.
Every exercise in the workbook is built on that distinction. CBT-style thought records identify the specific belief structure underneath a recurring pattern and interrupt it precisely. NLP timeline and future-pacing exercises take a principle from abstract understanding to felt, embodied rehearsal. Somatic check-ins anchor each session in the body rather than the head, because the subconscious communicates through physical sensation, not just through reasoning.
The 30-day structure is deliberate. Habit formation research puts the minimum threshold for a new behaviour to feel natural at 21-66 days, depending on complexity. 30 days sits at the lower end with a full review cycle - enough repetition to shift a default, not so long that momentum collapses before you finish.
How to Use It
Four things that make the difference
- 1
Print it and write by hand
Handwriting activates deeper processing than typing. The motor memory of physically writing a belief, a response, or an intention encodes it differently than keystrokes. Print the workbook and use a pen - it is a functional difference, not a stylistic preference.
- 2
Same time every day
Link the practice to an existing anchor - immediately after your first coffee, or the last thing before sleep. Habit stacking removes the daily decision of whether to do it. The decision is already made.
- 3
Do not skip the body check-in
The somatic prompts at the start of each session are the most skippable-looking part and the most important. What your body is holding at the moment you begin determines how deeply the exercises land. Two minutes of physical grounding before cognitive work changes the quality of everything that follows.
- 4
If you miss a day, continue from where you stopped
Do not restart. Restarting from day one after a miss turns the workbook into a test of willpower rather than a practice tool. The sequence builds on itself - day 15 is more useful after days 1-14, even with gaps.
Worth knowing
This is a practice system, not a reference tool
The workbook takes you through 30 days of structured exercises - it is not designed for quick reference or scanning. If you want the principles in a format you can pin up and return to in 30 seconds, that is what the cheat sheets are for. The cheat sheets are here.
Who This Is For
You'll get the most from this if…
- ✓You want to understand how habitual thought patterns form and how to systematically change them without exhausting willpower battles
- ✓You have heard about the subconscious mind but want a structured, practical framework for working with it deliberately
- ✓You recognise the rebound effect - how trying not to think about something makes it stronger - and want an alternative strategy
- ✓You are interested in the history of positive psychology and want to understand the pre-scientific foundations of what CBT later formalised
- ✓You want to understand the relationship between self-image, cognitive quality, and what your mind can actually produce
- ✓You are doing identity-level change work and want a systematic guide to consciously impressing the subconscious with a new self-concept
Complete the Practice
Complete the How The Mind Works practice
Quick-Start Cheat Sheets
The core principles across multiple printable pages.
Habit Tracker & Goal Planner
Track the micro-habits that compound into lasting change.
52-Week Daily Affirmation Calendar
52 weeks of daily affirmations - one for every day from May 2026 to April 2027.
Affirmation Card Deck
52 cards to carry the teaching into every part of your day.
The Toolkit
All five products for this work in one discounted bundle. Save 30%.
Annotated Edition
Christie L. Russell's annotated edition with neuroscience and NLP commentary.
About the Work
How The Mind Works - New Thought, 1866-1954
Larson's practical framing of habitual thought and mental discipline - how the mind habitually attends, reacts, and organises experience, and how directed thinking reshapes outcomes.
The Science Behind It
Larson's prolific optimism-based approach is the closest New Thought comes to positive psychology as a formal discipline. His emphasis on the 'promise yourself' principle maps to self-compassion research - treating yourself as you would a good friend is one of the most evidence-backed interventions for sustained positive change. His insistence on consistency over intensity anticipates what we now know about neuroplasticity: small repeated actions create stronger and more durable neural pathways than occasional dramatic ones.
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