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‘THE MONKEY THEORY: CONQUER YOUR MENTAL
CHATTER’ BY SFURTI SAHARE

Date: 2025-05-21
Author: Fiza Pathan
Format: Braille-Ready Text (BRF)
Website: fizapathansteachingportfolioforpgcite.com

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Introduction


We are surrounded by Gen-Alpha and Gen-Z
students who are victims of severe cases
of procrastination, anxiety, disorderly
behavior, and a heightened sense of
materialism. They look for validation
for their existence from social media
and their peers, both of which are
detrimental to their overall development
and growth as ethical adults of the
future. Never before has such a crisis
occurred where the younger generation
seems ‘unfit’ to take on the
responsibilities of a hi-tech,
fast-evolving society. Instead, they
have become the victims of the various
issues related to this accelerated model
of societal development, including
becoming hardcore addicts of gaming,
drugs, alcohol, vaping, smoking,
gambling, racing, and the like. In such
instances, life coach and motivational
speaker Sfurti Sahare brings out this
timely self-help or how-to-book for the
young to tackle the mental negative
chatter that dominates their waking
moments.


Sfurti Sahare is the national
bestselling author of ‘Think And Win
Like Dhoni’, published by Jaico Books,
which established her name in the Indian
publishing world as a winning
motivational speaker, life coach, and
success manual expert. It also
established her name as a reputed sports
writer, and now she will be coming out
with her latest sports how-to book
titled ‘Think and Win Like Virat: 5
Success Secrets’. Sahara has a knack for
breaking down complex psychological
jargon into lucid and easy-to-understand
story mnemonics for the young to
understand, especially those not used to
reading heavy self-help books or those
from our present troubled Gen-Alpha and
Gen-Z generation.


In ‘The Monkey Theory: Conqueror Your
Mental Chatter’, Sfurti Sahare, through
a series of monkeys that live in our
brains like the Drunk Monkey, Anger
Monkey, Fear Monkey, Procrastination
Monkey, etc., manages to decipher the
negative mental chatter the young
indulge in every day, sometimes 24/7,
especially while at school, college, or
on social media. She also challenges the
reader to win over or defeat their
negative monkeys and fulfill only the
dreams and ambitions of the Human
Monkey, the only monkey that seeks the
betterment of humans. Sahare believes
that we can overcome our hidden demons,
or mischievous monkeys, to get to where
we want to see ourselves as successful,
happy, and ethical citizens of the new
global future.


Synopsis


“It’s not talent that makes a winner.
It’s what you do with the talent that
matters.” ― Sfurti Sahare (Think and Win
Like Dhoni)


The book begins with the Human Monkey in
a hypothetical crisis about how to
fulfill his dreams when he is at every
point in his existence thwarted in his
attempts by various negative monkeys in
the form of negative self-talk or mental
chatter. He mentions his struggles with
the P-Monkey or Procrastination Monkey,
the Fear Monkey, the Drunk Monkey, the
Complaint Monkey, the Aggression Monkey,
etc. The author then, through the help
of the hypothetical idea of an ‘Eagle of
Wisdom,’ takes the Human Monkey on a
journey of inner healing and
transformation that does get a person to
reach their goals and to fulfill their
various aspirations in life for the
betterment of themselves and the world
at large.


During this process, the Human Monkey is
shown a series of life examples
showcasing how one gives into
procrastination, anxiety, self-doubt,
aggression, complaints, etc., and then
how to eliminate these negative
emotions, turning them into
opportunities for success, thereby
creating a foundation for more positive
and beneficial monkeys ruling the mind
of the individual and not the earlier
unruly negative monkeys. The
hypothetical Eagle of Wisdom takes such
a Human Monkey on a journey to the heart
of the mental chatter where the positive
monkeys are kidnapped and onto a
magically peaceful island called the
‘purple island’ that individuals can use
as their go-to place to remind
themselves not to let their emotions
take the better of their rational
judgement and sense of equilibrium.


Using simple analogies, real-life
examples, and engaging exercises, Sfurti
Sahare manages to convey the required
requisites needed for every Gen-Alpha
and Gen-Z individual to stop letting
their mental chatter get the better of
them and instead start crafting their
own future using their talents, skills,
and resources at their disposal. This is
because it does not depend on how smart,
wealthy, resourceful, and organized you
are but on how you use those talents,
resources, skills, etc., to achieve what
you need in this lifetime. And you only
live once as the personality you are! So
why waste one’s life running after
trivialities when life needs to be seen
in the bigger picture beyond what one
can easily see and perceive? In this
book, Sfurti Sahare teaches us to look
beyond what we see.


Analysis


This non-fiction how-to or self-help
book is the perfect tool for Gen-Alpha
and Gen-Z individuals struggling with
issues that their predecessors normally
did not face while growing up. This is
because their predecessors, including
young Millennials, have been given the
opportunity to have several things at
their disposal for free, which is not
available to their successive
generations, and the following list
speaks of these unique opportunities
that they had:


1. Leisure Time in plenty to do as they
please, especially to be content to be
with themselves and to do their own
thing, be it playing a musical
instrument for long hours at a stretch,
painting with watercolors all night,
reading novels in a park till the sun
sets, etc., or even just sitting idle
and watching a natural scene like the
sunset, the sunrise, the activities on a
beach, children at play in a park,
animals going about their daily errands,
flowers blooming, etc. They had the
leisure and the dignity to take time off
in plenty to ‘stand and stare’ and
participate in rejuvenating and
revitalizing leisure time.


2. They were not so materialistic and
prone to giving into affective values
like loyalty, love, compassion, empathy,
mercy, gratefulness, remorse, etc. All
these emotions came naturally to them,
and all could be easily identified from
the expressions of these Boomers, Gen-Y,
Gen-X, and Millennial Individuals. It
was not difficult for past generations
to emote and feel the pain of others; it
did not take a lot of effort to do so.
Money, fame, power, gadgets, etc., were
not the ultimate sources of lasting
fulfillment for these earlier
generations. Instead, feeling
comfortable with themselves and being
contented individuals doing their best
to help one another is what defined
these people best.


3. They were very much in tune with
nature and spent more than 85% of their
waking moments surrounded by nature or
within the bosom of nature. Playtime was
always meant to happen outdoors in
gardens, parks, fields, meadows, near
river banks, etc., where knees were
scraped, dips were taken in cool pools,
swings were made with tyres attached to
branches of trees with a strong rope,
basketball, and cricket galore were
played on hot, dusty fields, flowers
were plucked and scattered upon each
other like confetti and no bicycle race
in the wild was complete without a good
roll in the wet mud.


4. Their lives were not a rat race of
tuition, competitive exams, portfolio
submission work, CV updates,
extracurricular classes for credit, and
working late into the night trying to
make it to the University of their
Dreams. Life was simply – simple! Life
was not a never-ending competition, and
your worth as a human did not depend on
the money in your bank account and your
previous stalwart alma maters. Life was
beautiful because it was not a race.


5. They loved to play ‘make-believe’
games and dramatize situations like
being a doctor in the hospital, a
teacher at school, or a policeman, being
the Famous Five or the Secret Seven,
depending on how many friends came out
to play that day with their dog or dogs!
It prepared them to empathize, so it was
not difficult for them to think out of
the box or from another person’s point
of view or perspective about a
situation.


6. They believed in a better tomorrow
where hope would dry the tears from each
one’s tired eyes and where self-efficacy
equaled responsibility towards not only
one’s own education but also the
positive edification of others. They did
not drown themselves in addictions just
because they felt reality was too
difficult to digest.


This is all what Gen-Alpha and Gen-Z
lack, but Sfurti Sahare has managed
through this book to bridge that gap by
making the young focus on their
strengths or positive monkeys rather
than their negative monkeys. In her
book, the author mainly focuses on the
Procrastination Monkey, the Fear Monkey,
the Drunk Monkey, and the Positive Human
Monkey. She mentions that we need to
focus on the Human Monkey’s wants and
needs because only they align with our
dreams and aspirations to make us better
versions of ourselves. The other monkeys
only seek temporary solace in life and
do not like to go the extra mile to work
hard to fulfill their goals in life.


The P-Monkey or the Procrastination
Monkey tends to distract the young
student from achieving their goals. The
P-Monkey does not focus on hard work and
consistency but concentrates on
temporary self-gratification and
self-indulgence. This is evident when a
Gen-Alpha individual prefers to keep
gaming the whole day and live in a
virtual world for the greater part of
their lives than to work hard to gain
true success in the real world. This is
also evident when, instead of following
a timetable or a to-do list for the day,
the Gen-Alpha individual prefers to
waste time by scrolling through his
social media messages the whole day and
even conversing or chatting online at
night till the early morning hours.


The above scenarios are nothing but
examples of the P-Monkey at work in our
lives, and Sfurti Sahare, through her
book, enlightens us to especially not
give in to the whims and fancies of this
monkey. She informs us to distract this
monkey by stalling, not the work we have
on hand, on our to-do lists, or in our
study timetables for the day, but
instead to stall the gratification of
our temporary self-indulgent wants and
desires. We can do this by letting the
P-Monkey know through stern mental
self-talk that we will gratify his
desires later or once our work for the
day is done. It then turns out that by
the time the day’s work or study is
done, the need or urge to gratify the
P-Monkey will not be so desirable or
warranted, leading to lessening the
influence of this Monkey in our minds
and lives.


Similarly, with the Fear Monkey, who
technically tries not to allow us to
take risks in case of self-harm, it is
evident that to get around him, we need
to distract him or gas-light him in a
roundabout way as well. Humans are very
adaptable by nature; that is why we’ve
been the most successful animal race on
Earth, even though we were not as
gigantic or powerful as the dinosaurs.
So it is very easy to adapt ourselves to
get distracted IN THE RIGHT WAY FOR THE
RIGHT REASONS. We don’t need to distract
ourselves from our work or study but
from the mental chatter related to fear,
procrastination, guilt, anxiety,
self-gratification, etc., that prevents
us from achieving our goals.


This requires a lot of hard work,
unshakable resolve, a firm mind, steely
determination, and perseverance to get
this kind of distraction-free mindset to
work in our favor. But with the aid of
‘The Monkey Theory’ book, this too can
become easy. There is an old idiom that
says that one cannot bake a cake without
breaking some eggs. Success is indeed
only 10% talent and 90% hard work and
sweat.


Thus, though all the monkeys can be
distracted, first, a steely resolve has
to be established in the students' minds
not to distract themselves from what is
wanted but instead from what is
unwanted. One can distract the Fear
Monkey by letting him know that the
‘worry session’ or ‘anxiety-neurosis
session’ can take place at another time,
but not at the time when the work is at
hand or a to-do list is meant to be
checked out.


Monkeys can also be temporarily
distracted by cherries. The Cherry
Method is another crucial method that
the author, Sfurti Sahare, speaks about.
However, there is an issue with it that
I will focus on in this book's analysis
as we go along.


The Cherry Method, or throwing cherries,
is different from plain distraction
because, in this case, we are
distracting the concerned negative
monkey with something else to think or
work upon so that the monkey forgets why
he was interfering with us in the first
place. The example of the Cherry Method
used by life coach Sfurti Sahare is an
individual climbing the stairs and
spotting a giant, gigantic brown lizard
on one of the steps. At first, the Fear
Monkey kicks in and tells us to run away
from the situation, but then we distract
that monkey with the thought that
upstairs is our room where our phone is
where a while ago, our best friend
informed us that a mutual friend of ours
has broken up with her long-term
boyfriend over something sensational. To
gratify our sadistic joy at our mutual
friend’s loss, we are intrigued to know
more, overcome the fear of the lizard on
the stairway, pass over it, and head to
our room and phone. What have we done?
We have thrown a bunch of cherries to
distract the Fear Monkey and excite his
curiosity over another matter. In this
example, however, Sfurti Sahare does not
focus on whether we should study or
finish our work assignment after we
reach our rooms or go to our phones and
gloat over the loss of our friend by
slandering her behind her back.


The author does not touch upon this,
leaving the book incomplete. I shall
complete it by saying that after
throwing the cherry or the sadistic
cherry of our dear friend’s loss to curb
the Fear Monkey, we head safely to our
rooms. Instead of heading to our phones,
we head to our study table, open our
textbooks to restart our studies, or
open our laptops to continue our weekend
work assignments or projects. We then
consciously try not to gloat in thought
over our friend’s loss, and then later
when our job or work at hand is done, we
vow to call the friend in question to
take her out maybe for a movie or to the
park to chat with her and give her a
moments rest from her traumatic period
or go for a coffee to allow her to vent
her sorrow and for us to be a consoling
factor in her life.


" We must learn to regard people less in
the light of what they do or omit to do,
and more in the light of what they
suffer.” ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a German
Lutheran pastor, neo-orthodox
theologian, and anti-Nazi dissident who
was a key founding member of the
Confessing Church)


(Letters and Papers from Prison)


This is the slight improvement I wish to
extend regarding the Cherry Method of
Persuasive Distraction. Otherwise, it is
an effective method. Also, lizards are
cute little guys; they are more scared
of us than we are of them! Having them
in one’s home and private garden is
sometimes a real blessing. They keep
other poisonous lizards and insects away
from our residences better than an
Electronic Insect and Mosquito Killer.


Where the Drunk Monkey is concerned,
according to the author and life coach
Sfurti Sahare, he can be curbed or even
eliminated if we train ourselves to have
control over our emotions. She is not
telling us to avoid being emotional;
instead, she is asking us not to base
our reactions solely on how the
emotional train of life guides us. We
need to be rational and logical in
thinking out the consequences of our
actions and the actions of others. We
then should take our next step
accordingly. The Drunk Monkey, like any
drunk individual, does not have control
over himself and his desires, and we
don’t need to give into this monkey and
his frivolities at all, especially when
we have work at hand. Instead, we can
distract him by ignoring his irrational
judgements for another time or by
throwing him some cherries to keep him
distracted while we go on some other
work or subject of useful study.


According to author Sfurti Sahare, we
can also throw some Oxygen Bars at the
negative monkeys troubling us. In this
case, especially to calm down our
emotions, which seem to be running wild,
like in the case of the overactive Drunk
Monkey trying to rule us, we can calm
him down by distracting him by doing
some breathing exercises or some Yoga or
Pranayama Breathing Exercises. A good
and large dose of fresh oxygen always
makes us think more positively than
negatively, even in a troubling
situation. It can calm us down for a
long spell so that we can refocus our
attention on our goals or damage control
if we are in a difficult situation. She
highly recommends breathing exercises or
Oxygen Bars to be used to distract these
negative monkeys regularly. Just like
while gyming or exercising, we love to
snack on some healthy muesli bars or
energy bars to regain our strength for
some more work, so also Oxygen Bars help
us to work even better and to strengthen
our ‘emotional immunity’, not to mention
our power of forbearance.


Sfurti Sahare focuses on two other
elements in this book: the Eagle of
Wisdom and the Purple Island. Where the
latter is concerned, it is the island
that we must, in our imagination, fix as
a crown upon our heads to make us know
that in all circumstances, we need to
remain calm and always visualize
ourselves in the realm of the Purple
Island. On Purple Island, we are the
bosses of our destiny because we don’t
let our emotions get the better of us
and decide consciously to remain calm
and peaceful at all times. Even if we
feel a bit wayward in our resolve at
some point in time, we must return in
our imagination to this calming island
so that we can regain our composure with
the help also of some more Oxygen Bars
and then, after a healthy rejuvenation
go on to the next order of business.


Where the Eagle of Wisdom is concerned,
this is our guiding conscience who can
guide the Human Monkey towards achieving
his goals, but only if he presents
himself more often to this Eagle and
heeds all the advice given to him by
this Eagle. What the author, however,
did not focus upon was the fact that
this is technically not usually easy to
do because it is hard to sift words of
true wisdom from the varied thoughts and
negative chatter that goes on in our
minds 24/7 and sometimes, sadly even in
our sleep and dreams. Therefore, we must
first learn to sift the sound advice of
the Eagle of Wisdom from the negative
chatter of the Negative Monkeys in our
head. To do this, the student needs the
constant practice of introspection on
their part to have a calm disposition
and always think things over rationally
after thoroughly inspecting the facts
before jumping to conclusions. If one’s
thoughts are inclined to harm or extort
another person's expertise or other
resources for one’s selfish gain, then
such thoughts are not from the Eagle of
Wisdom because Wisdom does not hanker
after what is not one’s own. Wisdom is
the voice of reason, and the voice of
reason always speaks the truth, which is
good for oneself and others. To hear
this voice in our heads, one has to
listen carefully and sift through the
chatter, but the key is that the voice
should benefit you and another without
resorting to violence or illegal
criminal practices.


“One man practicing kindness in the
wilderness is worth all the temples this
world pulls.” ― Jack Kerouac
(Internationally Famous American
Novelist and Poet) (from the Book ‘The
Dharma Bums’)


Then only is it the voice of the Eagle
of Wisdom, not otherwise, if it benefits
one another.


“If your compassion does not include
yourself, it is incomplete.”


― Jack Kornfield (American writer and
teacher in the Vipassana movement in
American Theravada Buddhism and
Internationally bestselling spiritual
writer)


(from the Book ‘Buddha's Little
Instruction Book’)


Other monkeys focused on are a range of
negative and positive monkeys like the
Aggression Monkey, the Guilt Monkey, the
Compassion Monkey, the Grateful Monkey,
etc. All are associated with the idea
that gratefulness and compassion should
be the hallmark of every student’s life.
Thus, these two crucial monkeys, along
with the Monkey of Confidence, will keep
the students boat afloat and will not
allow them to drown in the various
storms created by the other negative
monkeys at sea. It is always possible
that all the negative monkeys can easily
gang up against the Human Monkey to
torture them to submit to defeat, but
with the techniques taught by the author
and motivational coach Sfurti Sahare, we
can manage to keep our equanimity of
mind and to move on with our work and
not give in to distractions. The virtues
of compassion and gratefulness can aid
the person in getting a realistic and
holistic understanding of life and its
realities. It also helps the individual
to be a human being and not a mere
machine extracting the maximum from
another individual like a greedy sponge.


Conclusion


Thus, this book helps the individual to
live distraction and negative chatter
free to excel in life and to make the
world a better place to live in. It
teaches the reader self-efficacy and
allows a person to maintain an
equanimity of mind and soul through
healthy, easy-to-understand mental
practices, including one’s favorite
positive hobbies like a sport, painting,
journaling, diary writing, blogging,
etc. I hope to read more books written
by motivational speaker Sfurti Sahare in
the near future. I highly recommend this
book to all MYP students in any IGCSE
and IB school from the 6th to the 10th
grades. It is an excellent self-help
book without the heavy statistics and
jargon that are usually scattered about
in other serious non-fiction self-help
books, which makes the reading process
for younger readers less enjoyable. If
one is especially facing a crisis in
one’s study schedule or in getting job
assignments done, one should pick up
this book and have a go at it,
especially solving the exercises after
each chapter in the book.


Special Note


If you are interested in more book
reviews, indie author interviews, book
analyses, short story analyses, poems,
essays, essay analyses, and other
bookish content, check out my blog,
insaneowl.com . If you are interested in
purchasing my books, you can check the
products page of my blog or on Amazon .
There is a lot of good stuff to buy!
Happy reading to you always!


©2025 Fiza Pathan


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