Psycho-Cybernetics
The science of cybernetics does not tell us that man is a machine but that man has and uses a machine.
It is not the child who is taught about love but the child who has experienced love that grows into a healthy, happy, well-adjusted adult. Our present state of self-confidence and poise is the result of what we have experienced rather than what we have learned intellectually.
Both experimental and clinical psychology have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail.
It usually requires a minimum of about 21 days to effect any perceptible change in a mental image. Following plastic surgery it takes about 21 days for the average patient to get used to his new face. When an arm or leg is amputated, the “phantom limb” persists for about 21 days. People must live in a new house for about three weeks before it begins to “seem like home.” These and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.
All your actions, feelings, behaviors—even your abilities—are always consistent with this self-image. In short, you will “act like” the sort of person you conceive yourself to be. Not only this, but you literally cannot act otherwise, in spite of all your conscious efforts or willpower.
Jesus warned us about the folly of putting a patch of new material on an old garment, or of putting new wine into old bottles. “Positive thinking” cannot be used effectively as a patch or a crutch to the same old self-image. In fact, it is literally impossible to really think positively about a particular situation as long as you hold a negative concept of your “self.”
The trouble was an inadequate self-image (“ I don’t have a mathematical mind”; “I’m just naturally a poor speller”). They “identified” with their mistakes and failures. Instead of saying “I failed that test” (factual and descriptive), they concluded, “I am a failure.” Instead of saying “I flunked that subject,” they said, “I am a flunk-out.”
The new science of cybernetics has furnished us with convincing proof that the so-called subconscious mind is not a “mind” at all, but a mechanism—a goal-striving “servo-mechanism” consisting of the brain and nervous system, which is used by, and directed by the mind.
The goals that our own Creative Mechanism seeks to achieve are mental images, or mental pictures, which we create by the use of imagination. The key goal-image is our self-image.
The method itself consists in learning, practicing, and experiencing new habits of thinking, imagining, remembering, and acting in order to (1) develop an adequate and realistic self-image, and (2) use your Creative Mechanism to bring success and happiness in achieving particular goals.
Visualizing (creative mental picturing) is no more difficult than what you do when you remember some scene out of the past, or worry about the future. Acting out new action patterns is no more difficult than “deciding,” then following through on tying your shoes in a new and different manner each morning, instead of continuing to tie them in your old habitual way, without thought or decision.
In man, the goal “to live” means more than mere survival. For an animal “to live” simply means that certain physical needs must be met. Man has certain emotional and spiritual needs that animals do not have. Consequently for man “to live” encompasses more than physical survival and procreation of the species. It requires certain emotional and spiritual satisfactions as well.
Dugold Stewart, the famous Scottish philosopher, also observed, “The faculty of imagination is the great spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement. . . . Destroy this faculty, and the condition of man will become as stationary as that of the brutes.”
The torpedo accomplishes its goal by going forward, making errors, and continually correcting them. By a series of zigzags it literally gropes its way to the goal.
It is still a mystery how a mechanism as small as the human brain can store such a vast amount of information.
In much the same way, when we set out to find a new idea, or the answer to a problem, we must assume that the answer exists already—somewhere—and set out to find it. Dr. Norbert Wiener wrote in The Human Use of Human Beings, “Once a scientist attacks a problem which he knows to have an answer, his entire attitude is changed. He is already some 50 percent of his way toward that answer.”
1. Your built-in Success Mechanism must have a goal or “target.” This goal, or target, must be conceived of as “already in existence—now” either in actual or potential form. It operates by either (1) steering you to a goal already in existence or (2) “discovering” something already in existence.
Think in terms of the end result, and the means whereby will often take care of themselves.
Many people make the mistake of interfering with their Success Mechanism by demanding a how before a goal is clearly established. After you’ve formed a mental image of the goal you seek to create, the how will come to you—not before. Remain calm and relaxed and the answers will arrive. Any attempt to force the ideas to come will not work. As Brian Tracy wrote, “In all mental workings, effort defeats itself.”
3. Do not be afraid of making mistakes, or of temporary failures. All servo-mechanisms achieve a goal by negative feedback, or by going forward, making mistakes, and immediately correcting course.
further learning, and continued success, is accomplished by forgetting the past errors, and remembering the successful response, so that it can be imitated.
5. You must learn to trust your Creative Mechanism to do its work and not “jam it” by becoming too concerned or too anxious as to whether it will work or not, or by attempting to force it by too much conscious effort. You must “let it” work, rather than “make it” work.
You must not wait to act until you have proof—you must act as if it is there, and it will come through. “Do the thing and you will have the power,”
Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you think or imagine to be true.
A role-playing salesman, at night when he is alone, will create these situations. He will imagine the prospect throwing the widest kind of curves at him. Then he will work out the best answer to them . . . No matter what the situation is, you can prepare for it beforehand by means of imagining yourself and your prospect face-to-face while he is raising objections and creating problems and you are handling them properly.
It was Bulla’s theory that if you would picture the end result—see the ball going where you wanted it to go—and have the confidence to know that it was going to do what you wanted, your subconscious would take over and direct your muscles correctly. If your grip was wrong, and your stance not in the best form, your subconscious would still take care of that by directing your muscles to do whatever was necessary to compensate for the error in form.
Thus, mentally picturing the desired end result literally forces you to use “positive thinking.” You are not relieved thereafter from effort and work, but your efforts are used to carry you forward toward your goal, rather than in the futile mental conflict that results when you want and try to do one thing, but picture to yourself something else.
This same Creative Mechanism within you can help you achieve your best possible “self” if you will form a picture in your imagination of the self you want to be and see yourself in the new role. This is a necessary condition to personality transformation, regardless of the method of therapy used. Somehow, before a person can change, he must see himself in a new role.
The aim of self-image psychology is not to create a fictitious self that is all-powerful, arrogant, egoistic, and all-important. Such an image is as inappropriate and unrealistic as the inferior image of self. Our aim is to find the real self, and to bring our mental images of ourselves more in line with the objects represented by our goals.
Jesus expressed the same thought when he told us not to hide our light under a bushel, but to let our light shine “so that your Father may be glorified.” I cannot believe that it brings any glory to God when his children go around with hangdog expressions, being miserable, afraid to lift up their heads and “be somebody.”
We must recognize the possibility of change and believe in the self we are now in the process of becoming. That old sense of unworthiness and failure must go. It is false and we are not to believe in what is false.
Set aside a period of 30 minutes each day when you can be alone and undisturbed. Relax and make yourself as comfortable as possible. Now close your eyes and exercise your imagination. Many people find they get better results if they imagine themselves sitting before a large motion picture screen—and imagine that they are seeing a motion picture of themselves. The important thing is to make these pictures as vivid and as detailed as possible. You want your mental pictures to approximate actual experience as much as possible. The way
The next important thing to remember is that during this 30 minutes you see yourself acting and reacting appropriately, successfully, ideally. It doesn’t matter how you acted yesterday. You do not need to try to have faith you will act in the ideal way tomorrow. Your nervous system will take care of that in time—if you continue to practice. See yourself acting, feeling, “being,” as you want to be. Do not say to yourself, “I am going to act this way tomorrow.” Just say to yourself: “I am going to imagine myself acting this way now—for thirty minutes today.” Imagine how you would feel if you were already the sort of personality you want to be. If you have been shy and timid, see yourself moving among people with ease and poise and feeling good because of it. If you have been fearful and anxious in certain situations, see yourself acting calmly and deliberately, acting with confidence and courage—and feeling expansive and confident because you are. This exercise builds new “memories” or stored data into your mid-brain and central nervous system. It builds a new image of self. After practicing it for a time, you will be surprised to find yourself “acting differently,” more or less automatically and spontaneously—without trying. This is as it should be. You
an idea accepted as true from any source can be every bit as powerful as hypnosis.
It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent, either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others, or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect on our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.
Feelings of inferiority originate not so much from facts or experiences, but our conclusions regarding facts, and our evaluation of experiences. For example, the fact is that I am an inferior weight lifter and an inferior dancer. This does not, however, make me an “inferior person.” Paul Anderson’s and Arthur Murray’s inability to perform surgery makes them “inferior surgeons,” but not “inferior persons.” It all depends on “what” and “whose” norms we measure ourselves by.
And this feeling of inferiority comes about for just one reason: We judge ourselves, and measure ourselves, not against our own “norm” or “par” but against some other individual’s “norm.” When we do this, we always, without exception, come out second best. But because we think and believe and assume that we should measure up to some other person’s “norm,” we feel miserable, and second-rate, and conclude that there is something wrong with us.
All this comes about because we have allowed ourselves to be hypnotized by the entirely erroneous idea that “I should be like so-and-so” or “I should be like everybody else.” The fallacy of the second idea can be readily seen through, if analyzed, for in truth there are no fixed standards common to “everybody else.” “Everybody else” is composed of individuals, no two of whom are alike. The person with an inferiority complex invariably compounds the error by striving for superiority. His feelings spring from the false premise that he is inferior. From this false premise, a whole structure of “logical thought” and feeling is built. If he feels bad because he is inferior, the cure is to make himself as good as everybody else, and the way to feel really good is to make himself superior. This striving for superiority gets him into more trouble, causes more frustration, and sometimes brings about a neurosis where none existed before. He becomes more miserable than ever, and “the harder he tries,” the more miserable he becomes. Inferiority and superiority are reverse sides of the same coin. The cure lies in realizing that the coin itself is spurious. The truth about you is this: You are not “inferior.” You are not “superior.” You are simply “You.” “You” as a personality are not in competition with any other personality simply because there is not another person on the face of the earth like you, or in your particular class. You are an individual. You are unique. You are not “like”…
Stop measuring yourself against “their” standards. You are not “them” and can never measure up. Neither can “they” measure up to yours—nor should they. Once you see this simple, rather self-evident truth, accept it, and believe it, your inferior feelings will vanish.
Dr. Norton L. Williams, a psychiatrist, addressing a medical convention, said that modern man’s anxiety and insecurity stemmed from a lack of self-realization, and that inner security can only be found “in finding in oneself an individuality, uniqueness, and distinctiveness that is akin to the idea of being created in the image of God.” He also said that self-realization is gained by “a simple belief in one’s own uniqueness as a human being, a sense of deep and wide awareness of all people and all things, and a feeling of constructive influencing of others through one’s own personality.”
Physical relaxation plays a key role in the dehypnotization process. Our currently held beliefs, whether good or bad, true or false, were formed without effort, with no sense of strain, and without the exercise of “willpower.” Our habits, whether good or bad, were formed in the same way. It follows that we must employ the same process in forming new beliefs, or new habits—that is, in a relaxed condition.
Making an effort to refrain from the habit actually reinforced the habit, he found. His experiments proved that the best way to break a habit is to form a clear mental image of the desired end result, and to practice without effort toward reaching that goal. Dunlap found that either “positive practice” (refraining from the habit) or “negative practice” (performing the habit consciously and voluntarily) would have beneficial effect provided the desired end result was kept constantly in mind. “If a response habit is to be learned, or if a response pattern is to be made habitual,” Dr. Dunlap wrote in Personal Adjustment, “it is essential that the learner shall have an idea of the response that is to be achieved or shall have an idea of the change in the environment that the response will produce. . . . The important factor in learning, in short, is the thought of an objective to be attained, either as a specific behavior pattern or as the result of the behavior, together with a desire for the attainment of the object.”
Physical relaxation, when practiced daily, brings about an accompanying mental relaxation and a relaxed attitude that enables us to better consciously control our automatic mechanism. Physical relaxation also, in itself, has a powerful influence in dehypnotizing us from negative attitudes and reaction patterns.
Spend about five minutes on this and then stop paying any attention to your muscles. This is as far as you are going to try to go by conscious control. From here on out you will relax more and more by using your Creative Mechanism to automatically bring about a relaxed condition. In short, you are going to use “goal pictures,” held in imagination, and let your automatic mechanism realize those goals for you.
Lecky believed that it was inherent in the very nature of “mind” itself that all ideas and concepts that make up the total content of “personality” must seem to be consistent with each other. If the inconsistency of a given idea is consciously recognized, it must be rejected.
One of my patients was a salesman who was “scared to death” when calling on “big shots.” His fear and nervousness were overcome in just one counseling session, during which I asked him, “Would you physically get down on all fours and crawl into the man’s office, prostrating yourself before a superior personage?” “I should say not!” He bristled. “Then why do you mentally cringe and crawl?” Another question: “Would you go into a man’s office with your hand out like a beggar, and beg for a dime for a cup of coffee?” “Certainly not.” “Can’t you see that you are doing essentially the same thing, when you go in overly concerned with whether or not he will approve of you? Can’t you see that you have your hand out literally begging for his approval and acceptance of you as a person?”
Remember that both behavior and feeling spring from belief. To root out the belief that is responsible for your feeling and behavior—ask yourself, “Why?” Is there some task that you would like to do, some channel in which you would like to express yourself, but you hang back feeling that “I can’t”? Ask yourself, “Why?” “Why do I believe that I can’t?” Then ask yourself, “Is this belief based on an actual fact or on an assumption—or a false conclusion?” Then ask yourself the questions: 1. Is there any rational reason for such a belief? 2. Could it be that I am mistaken in this belief? 3. Would I come to the same conclusion about some other person in a similar situation? 4. Why should I continue to act and feel as if this were true if there is no good reason to believe it? Don’t just pass these questions by casually. Wrestle with them. Think hard on them. Get emotional about them. Can you see that you have cheated yourself and sold yourself short—not because of a “fact”—but only because of some stupid belief? If so, try to arouse some indignation, or even anger. Indignation and anger can sometimes act as liberators from false ideas. Alfred Adler “got mad” at himself and at his teacher and was enabled to throw off a negative definition of himself. This experience is not uncommon.
The Power of Deep Desire
Picture to yourself what you would like to be and have, and assume for the moment that such things might be possible. Arouse a deep desire for these things. Become enthusiastic about them. Dwell on them—and keep going over them in your mind. Your present negative beliefs were formed by thought plus feelings. Generate enough emotion, or deep feeling, and your new thoughts and ideas will cancel them out.
Remember that your automatic mechanism can as easily function as a Failure Mechanism as it can as a Success Mechanism, depending on the data you give it to process, and the goals you set for it. It is basically a goal-striving mechanism. The goals it works on are up to you.
Also remember that your automatic mechanism does not reason about, or question, the data you feed it. It merely processes it and reacts appropriately to it. It is very important that the automatic mechanism be given true facts concerning the environment. This is the job of conscious rational thought: to know the truth, to form correct evaluations, estimations, and opinions. In this connection most of us are prone to underestimate ourselves and overestimate the nature of the difficulty facing us. “Always think of what you have to do as easy and it will become so,” said Émile Coué,
To conclude “I can’t” in advance, without trying, and in the absence of any evidence to support the inevitability of failure, is not rational. We should be more like the man who was asked if he could play the piano. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you mean you don’t know?” he was asked. “I have never tried,” he replied.
Decide What You Want—Not What You Don’t Want
It is the job of conscious rational thought to decide what you want, select the goals you wish to achieve—and concentrate on these rather than on what you do not want.
Keep Your Eye on the Ball
It is not the job of your conscious rational mind, however, to create or to “do” the job at hand. We get into trouble when we either neglect to use conscious thinking in the way that it is meant to be used, or when we attempt to use it in a way that it was never meant to be used. We cannot squeeze creative thought out of the Creative Mechanism by making conscious effort. We cannot “do” the job to be done by making strained conscious efforts. And because we try and cannot, we become concerned, anxious, frustrated.
In short, conscious, rational thought selects the goal, gathers information, concludes, evaluates, estimates, and starts the wheels in motion. It is not, however, responsible for results. We must learn to do our work, act on the best assumptions available, and leave results to take care of themselves.
Don’t Be Too Careful
Yet that is precisely what modern man tries to do: solve all his problems by conscious thought. Jesus said, “Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?” Dr. Norbert Wiener tells us that man cannot even perform such a simple operation as picking up a pen from a table by conscious thought or “will.”
Prudence and duty and self-regard, emotions of ambition and emotions of anxiety, have, of course, a needful part to play in our lives. But confine them as far as possible to the occasions when you are making your general resolutions and deciding on your plans of campaign, and keep them out of the details. When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome. Unclamp, in a word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good.
“Under these circumstances,” said James, “the way to success, as vouched for by innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by . . . surrender . . . passivity, not activity—relaxation, not intentness, should be now the rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all. . . . It is but giving your private convulsive self a rest, and finding that a greater Self is there. The results, slow or sudden, or great or small, of the combined optimism and expectancy, the regenerative phenomena which ensue on the abandonment of effort, remain firm facts of human nature.”
The Secret of Creative Thinking and Creative Doing
All the evidence points to the conclusion that in order to receive an “inspiration” or a “hunch,” the person must first of all be intensely interested in solving a particular problem, or securing a particular answer. He must think about it consciously, gather all the information he can on the subject, consider all the possible courses of action. And above all, he must have a burning desire to solve the problem. But, after he has defined the problem, sees in his imagination the desired end result, secured all the information and facts that he can, then additional struggling, fretting, and worrying over it does not help, but seems to hinder the solution.
Bertrand Russell wrote in his book The Conquest of Happiness, “I have found, for example, that, if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic, the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity—the greatest intensity of which I am capable—for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done. Before I had discovered this technique, I used to spend the intervening months worrying because I was making no progress; I arrived at the solution none the sooner for this worry, and the intervening months were wasted, whereas now I can devote them to other pursuits.”
You Are a “Creative Worker”
The Secret of “Natural” Behavior and Skill
Skill in any performance, whether it be in sports, in playing the piano, in conversation, or in selling merchandise, consists not in painfully and consciously thinking out each action as it is performed, but in relaxing, and letting the job do itself through you. Creative performance is spontaneous and “natural” as opposed to self-conscious and studied. The most skilled pianist in the world could never play a simple composition if he tried to consciously think out just which finger should strike which key—while he was playing. He has given conscious thought to this matter previously—while learning—and has practiced until his actions become automatic and habit-like.
When you set a goal, it’s very important to keep in mind that most of the time you will be in “journey mode.” This means you will be focused on the process and the actions you need to take to get where you want to go—most of the time. If your goal is to climb Mount Everest, and you are only thinking about being at the top, you “jam” your success mechanism in the present. You’ve got to take care of each step along the way. Focus on the journey the majority of the time—and occasionally (once or twice per day when you visualize) tune into the goal. Then get back into journey mode and simply turn your goal over to your subconscious or Success Mechanism, to guide you there without effort. People who want to improve their financial situation must heed the same advice. If you continually obsess about where you are as well as where you want to be financially, you’re less likely to get there. Program the goal—then get busy on the process—and if you don’t know the process yet, give yourself space to allow the process of “how” to come to you. The “how” will come to you when you’re relaxed—not when you’re tense or trying to force your way through the process.
1. “Do Your Worrying Before You Place Your Bet, Not After the Wheel Starts Turning”
It didn’t make too much of an impression when you told me, but while I was playing roulette it came back to me. I noticed any number of people who appeared not to worry at all before placing their bets. Apparently odds meant nothing to them. But once the wheel started turning, they froze up, and began to worry whether their number would come up or not. How silly, I thought. If they want to worry, or be concerned, or figure odds, the time to do that is before the decision is made to place a bet. There is something you can do about it then, by thinking about it. You can figure out the best odds possible, or decide not to take the risk at all. But after the bets are placed and the wheel starts turning—you might as well relax and enjoy it—thinking about it is not going to do one bit of good, and is wasted energy.
2. Form the Habit of Consciously Responding to the Present Moment
Consciously practice the habit of “taking no anxious thought for tomorrow,” by giving all your attention to the present moment. Your Creative Mechanism cannot function or work tomorrow. It can only function in the present—today. Make long-range plans for tomorrow. But don’t try to live in tomorrow, or in the past. Creative living means responding and reacting to environment spontaneously. Your Creative Mechanism can respond appropriately and successfully to present environment—only if you have your full attention on present environment—and give it information concerning what is happening now. Plan all you want to for the future. Prepare for it. But don’t worry about how you will react tomorrow, or even five minutes from now.
LIVE IN DAY-TIGHT COMPARTMENTS
Alcoholics Anonymous uses the same principle when they say, “Don’t try to stop drinking forever—merely say, ‘I will not drink today.’”
STOP, LOOK, AND LISTEN!
Keep constantly in mind that the job of your Creative Mechanism is to respond appropriately to present environment—here and now. Many times, if we do not “stop and think” about this, we continue to react automatically to some past environment. We do not react to the present moment, and the present situation, but to some similar event out of the past. In short we do not react to reality—but to a fiction. Full recognition of this, and realization of what you’re doing, can frequently bring about an amazingly quick “cure.”
DON’T FIGHT STRAW MEN OUT OF THE PAST
Other typical examples are the woman who responds to every man she meets “as if” he were some individual man out of her past; the man who reacts to every person in authority “as if” he were some individual authority out of his past.
3. Try to Do Only One Thing at a Time
The businessman, instead of concentrating on and only trying to “do” the one letter that he is presently dictating, is thinking in the back of his mind of all the things he should accomplish today, or perhaps this week, and unconsciously trying mentally to accomplish them all at once. The habit is particularly insidious because it is seldom recognized for what it is. When we feel jittery, or worried, or anxious in thinking of the great amount of work that lies before us, the jittery feelings are not caused by the work, but by our mental attitude—which is “I ought to be able to do this all at once.” We become nervous because we are trying to do the impossible, and thereby making futility and frustration inevitable. The truth is: We can only do one thing at a time. Realizing this, fully convincing ourselves of this simple and obvious truth, enables us to mentally stop trying to do the things that lie next, and to concentrate all our awareness, all our responsiveness, on this one thing we are doing now. When we work with this attitude, we are relaxed, we are free from the feelings of hurry and anxiety, and we are able to concentrate and think at our best.
THE LESSON OF THE HOURGLASS
Dr. James Gordon Gilkey preached a sermon in 1944 called “Gaining Emotional Poise,” which was reprinted in Reader’s Digest and became a classic almost overnight. He had found, through many years of counseling, that one of the main causes of breakdown, worry, and all sorts of other personal problems, was this bad mental habit of feeling that you should be doing many things now. Looking at the hourglass on his desk, he had an inspiration. Just as only one grain of sand could pass through the hourglass, so could we only do one thing, at a time. It is not the job, but the way we insist on thinking of the job that causes the trouble. Most of us feel hurried and harried, said Dr. Gilkey, because we form a false mental picture of our duties, obligations, and responsibilities. There seem to be a dozen different things pressing in on us at any given moment; a dozen different things to do; a dozen different problems to solve; a dozen different strains to endure. No matter how hurried or harried our existence may be, said Dr. Gilkey, this mental picture is entirely false. Even on the busiest day the crowded hours come to us one moment at a time; no matter how many problems, tasks, or strains we face, they always come to us in single file, which is the only way they can come. To get a true mental picture, he suggested visualizing an hourglass, with the many grains of sand dropping one by one. This mental picture will bring emotional poise, just as the false mental picture will bring…
If you have been wrestling with a problem all day without making any apparent progress, try dismissing it from your mind, and put off making a decision until you’ve had a chance to “sleep on it.” Remember that your Creative Mechanism works best when there is not too much interference from your conscious “I.” In sleep, the Creative Mechanism has an ideal opportunity to work independently of conscious interference, if you have previously started the wheels turning.
Many creative workers have used a very similar technique. Mrs. Thomas A. Edison has said that each evening her husband would go over in his mind those things that he hoped to accomplish the next day. Sometimes, he would make a list of the jobs he wanted to do, and problems that he hoped to solve.
5. Relax While You Work
if you will form the habit of mentally remembering the nice relaxed feeling that you induced. Stop occasionally during the day, it need only take a moment, and remember in detail the sensations of relaxation. Remember how your arms felt, your legs, back, neck, face. Sometimes forming a mental picture of yourself lying in bed, or sitting relaxed and limp in an easy chair, helps to recall the relaxed sensations. Mentally repeating to yourself several times, “I feel more and more relaxed,” also helps. Practice this remembering faithfully several times each day. You will be surprised at how much it reduces fatigue, and how much better you are able to handle situations.
Happiness is not something that is earned or deserved. Happiness is not a moral issue, any more than the circulation of the blood is a moral issue. Both are necessary to health and well-being. Happiness is simply “a state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant a good share of the time.” If you wait until you deserve to think pleasant thoughts, you are likely to think unpleasant thoughts concerning your own unworthiness. “Happiness is not the reward of virtue,” said Spinoza in his book Ethics, “but virtue itself; nor do we delight in happiness because we restrain our lusts; but, on the contrary, because we delight in it, therefore are we able to restrain them.”
“The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly,” said William James. “What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What is less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation.”
Stop Letting Things Push You Around The best cure I have found for this sort of thing is to use unhappiness’s own weapon—self-esteem. “Have you ever been to a TV show and seen the master of ceremonies manipulate the audience?” I asked a patient. “He brings out a sign that says ‘applause’ and everyone applauds. He brings out another that says ‘laughter’ and everyone laughs. They act like sheep—as if they were slaves, and meekly react as they are told to react. You are acting the same way. You are letting outward events and other people dictate to you how you shall feel and how you shall react. You are acting as an obedient slave and obeying promptly when some event or circumstance signals to you—‘ Be angry’—‘ Get upset’—or ‘Now is the time to feel unhappy.’”
I then suggested that he memorize a saying of Epictetus, which has always been a favorite of mine: “Men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen.”
Psychologist H. L. Hollingworth said that happiness requires problems, plus a mental attitude that is ready to meet distress with action toward a solution.
Tomorrow morning determine which shoe you put on first and how you tie your shoes. Now consciously decide that for the next 21 days you are going to form a new habit by putting on the other shoe first and tying your laces in a different way. Each morning, as you decide to put on your shoes in a certain manner, let this simple act serve as a reminder to change other habitual ways of thinking, acting, and feeling throughout that one day. Say to yourself as you tie your shoes, “I am beginning the day in a new and better way.” Then, consciously decide that throughout the day: 1. I will be as cheerful as possible. 2. I will try to feel and act a little more friendly toward other people. 3. I am going to be a little less critical and a little more tolerant of other people, their faults, failings, and mistakes. I will place the best possible interpretation on their actions. 4. Insofar as possible, I am going to act as if successes are inevitable, and I already am the sort of personality I want to be. I will practice “acting like” and “feeling like” this new personality. 5. I will not let my own opinion color facts in a pessimistic or negative way. 6. I will practice smiling at least three times during the day. 7. Regardless of what happens, I will react as calmly and as intelligently as possible. 8. I will ignore completely and close my mind to all those pessimistic and negative “facts” that I can do nothing to change.
the creative guidance mechanism within you is a goal-striving mechanism, and the first requisite for using it is to have a clear-cut goal or target to shoot for.
A great many people want to improve themselves, and long for a better personality, but have no clear-cut idea of the direction in which improvement lies, or what constitutes a good personality. A good personality is one that enables you to deal effectively and appropriately with environment and reality, and to gain satisfaction from reaching goals that are important to you.
I have found that an easy-to-remember picture of the successful personality is contained in the letters of the word “success” itself. The success-type personality is composed of: Sense of direction Understanding Courage Compassion Esteem Self-Confidence Self-Acceptance
The advertising executive “straightened himself out” and regained his confidence within a short time, once he saw clearly that for several years he had been motivated by strong personal goals that he wanted to attain, including securing his present position. These goals, which were important to him, kept him on the track. However, once he got the promotion, he ceased to think in terms of what he wanted, but in terms of what others expected of him, or whether he was living up to other people’s goals and standards.
“Functionally, a man is somewhat like a bicycle,” I told him. “A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it is going forward towards something. You have a good bicycle. Your trouble is you are trying to maintain your balance sitting still, with no place to go. It’s no wonder you feel shaky.”
People who say that life is not worthwhile are really saying that they themselves have no personal goals that are worthwhile.
When you’re not goal-striving, not looking forward, you’re not really “living.” In addition to your purely personal goals, have at least one impersonal goal, or cause, which you can identify yourself with. Get interested in some project to help your fellow man—not out of a sense of duty, but because you want to.
Understanding Understanding depends on good communication. Communication is vital to any guidance system or computer. You cannot react appropriately if the information you act on is faulty or misunderstood. Many doctors believe that “confusion” is the basic element in neurosis. To deal effectively with a problem, you must have some understanding of its true nature. Most of our failures in human relations are due to “misunderstandings.”
We expect other people to react and respond and come to the same conclusions as we do from a given set of “facts” or “circumstances.” We should remember what we said in an earlier chapter—no one reacts to “things as they are,” but to his own mental images. Most of the time the other person’s reaction or position is not taken in order to make us suffer, nor to be hardheaded, or malicious, but because he “understands” and interprets the situation differently from us. He is merely responding appropriately to what—to him—seems to be the truth about the situation. To give the other person credit for being sincere, if mistaken, rather than willful and malicious, can do much to smooth out human relations and bring about better understanding between people. Ask yourself, “How does this appear—to him?” “How does he interpret this situation?” “How does he feel about it?” Try to understand why he might “act the way he does.”
BE WILLING TO SEE THE TRUTH
Someone has said that it is a good exercise to daily admit one painful fact about ourselves to ourselves. The success-type personality not only does not cheat and lie to other people, he learns to be honest with himself. What we call “sincerity” is itself based on self-understanding and self-honesty. For no man can be sincere who lies to himself by “rationalizing,” or telling himself “rational-lies.”
Prescription: Look for and seek out true information concerning yourself, your problems, other people, or the situation, whether it is good news or bad news. Adopt the motto, “It doesn’t matter who’s right, but what’s right.” An automatic guidance system corrects its course from negative feedback data. It acknowledges errors in order to correct them and stay on course. So must you. Admit your mistakes and errors, but don’t cry over them. Correct them and go forward. In dealing with other people, try to see the situation from their point of view as well as your own.
Courage Having a goal and understanding the situation are not enough. You must have the courage to act, for only by actions can goals, desires, and beliefs be translated into realities. Admiral William F. Halsey’s personal motto was a quotation from Nelson, “No Captain can do very wrong if he places his Ship alongside that of an Enemy.” “‘ The best defense is a strong offense,’ is a military principle,” said Halsey, “but its application is wider than war. All problems, personal, national, or combat, become smaller if you don’t dodge them, but confront them. Touch a thistle timidly, and it pricks you; grasp it boldly and its spines crumble.”
WHY NOT BET ON YOURSELF?
“Study the situation thoroughly, go over in your imagination the various courses of action possible to you and the consequences which can and may follow from each course. Pick out the course which gives the most promise—and go ahead. If we wait until we are absolutely certain and sure before we act, we will never do anything. Any time you act you can be wrong. Any decision you make can turn out to be the wrong one. But we must not let this deter us from going after the goal we want. You must daily have the courage to risk making mistakes, risk failure, risk being humiliated. A step in the wrong direction is better than staying ‘on the spot’ all your life. Once you’re moving forward you can correct your course as you go. Your automatic guidance system cannot guide you when you’re stalled, standing still.”
FAITH AND COURAGE ARE NATURAL INSTINCTS
It is also my theory that people who frustrate this natural instinct, by refusing to live creatively and act with courage, are the people who develop “gambling fever” and become addicts of gambling tables. A man who will not take a chance on himself must bet on something. And the man who will not act with courage sometimes seeks the feeling of courage from a bottle. Faith and courage are natural human instincts and we feel a need to express them—in one way or another.
Another helpful suggestion is to practice acting boldly and with courage in regard to “little things.” Do not wait until you can be a big hero in some dire crisis. Daily living also requires courage—and by practicing courage in little things, we develop the power and talent to act courageously in more important matters.
The person who feels that “people are not very important” cannot have very much deep-down self-respect and self-regard—for he himself is “people,” and with what judgment he considers others, he himself is unwittingly judged in his own mind. One of the best known methods of getting over a feeling of guilt is to stop condemning other people in your own mind—stop judging them—stop blaming them and hating them for their mistakes. You will develop a better and more adequate self-image when you begin to feel that other people are more worthy.
Prescription: The prescription for compassion is threefold: (1) Try to develop a genuine appreciation for people by realizing the truth about them; they are children of God, unique personalities, creative beings. (2) Take the trouble to stop and think of the other person’s feelings, his viewpoints, his desires and needs. Think more of what the other fellow wants, and how he must feel. A friend of mine kids his wife by telling her, whenever she asks him, “Do you love me?”—“ Yes, whenever I stop and think about it.” There is a lot of truth in this. We cannot feel anything about other people unless we “stop and think” about them. (3) Act as if other people are important and treat them accordingly. In your treatment of other people have regard for their feelings. We tend to feel about others in accordance with the way we treat them.
We simply must get it through our heads that holding a low opinion of ourselves is not a virtue, but a vice. Jealousy, for example, which is the scourge of many a marriage, is nearly always caused by self-doubt. The person with adequate self-esteem doesn’t feel hostile toward others, he isn’t out to prove anything, he can see facts more clearly, isn’t as demanding in his claims on other people.
The word “esteem” literally means to appreciate the worth of. Why do men stand in awe of the stars, and the moon, the immensity of the sea, the beauty of a flower or a sunset, and at the same time downgrade themselves? Did not the same Creator make man? Is not man himself the most marvelous creation of all? This appreciation of your own worth is not egotism unless you assume that you made yourself and should take some of the credit. Do not downgrade the product merely because you haven’t used it correctly. Don’t childishly blame the product for your own errors like the schoolboy who said, “This typewriter can’t spell.” But the biggest secret of self-esteem is this: Begin to appreciate other people more; show respect for any human being merely because he is a child of God and therefore a “thing of value.” Stop and think when you’re dealing with people. You’re dealing with a unique, individual creation of the Creator of all. Practice treating other people as if they have some value—and surprisingly enough your own self-esteem will go up. For real self-esteem is not derived from the great things you’ve done, the things you own, the mark you’ve made—but an appreciation of yourself for what you are—a child of God. When you come to this realization, however, you must necessarily conclude that all other people are to be appreciated for the same reason.
Self-Confidence
Confidence is built upon an experience of success. When we first begin any undertaking, we are likely to have little confidence, because we have not learned from experience that we can succeed. This is true of learning to ride a bicycle, speak in public, or perform surgery. It is literally true that success breeds success. Even a small success can be used as a stepping-stone to a greater one. Managers of boxers are very careful to match them so they can have a graduated series of successful experiences. We can use the same technique, starting gradually, and experiencing success at first on a small scale.
Another important technique is to form the habit of remembering past successes, and forgetting failures. This is the way both a computer and the human brain are supposed to operate.
To engage our Success Mechanisms, repeat the commands that work and remember them. Forget the mistakes and errors. Anytime you hit the wrong button or key, retrace your steps and go back to repeating the steps that are successful.
Prescription: Use errors and mistakes as a way to learning—then dismiss them from your mind. Deliberately remember and picture to yourself past successes. Everyone has succeeded sometime at something. Especially when beginning a new task, call up the feelings you experienced in some past success, however small it might have been.
When asked about previous successes, some people draw a blank. They literally cannot think of any. I used to be of the opinion these people were lying, practicing the cunning art of self-deception, and fooling no one. Some people’s “successes” were not perceived as their own. For instance, when asked if becoming a doctor was a success, one MD said that his parents wanted him to be a doctor, so he achieved their goal, not his. Another man who’d built his own home didn’t view this as a “success.” A woman who got straight A’s in school didn’t see this as a success because she was “expected to get them.” However, when one changed the word “success” to “happy moments,” “brave moments,” or “good times,” these same people could recall their “success experiences.” They remembered hitting a home run, winning a tennis match, shooting a duck while hunting and hearing friends exclaim, “Great shot!” Just as “goals” can be seen as “projects”—“ success experiences” can be called “happy moments” or something similar.
Self-Acceptance
Changing your self-image does not mean changing your self, or improving your self, but changing your own mental picture, your own estimation, conception, and realization of that self. The amazing results, which follow from developing an adequate and realistic self-image, come about, not as a result of self-transformation, but from self-realization, and self-revelation. Your “self,” right now, is what it has always been, and all that it can ever be. You did not create it. You cannot change it. You can, however, realize it, and make the most of what already is by gaining a true mental picture of your actual self. There is no use straining to “be somebody.” You are what you are now. You are somebody, not because you’ve made a million dollars, or drive the biggest car on your block, or win at bridge—but because God created you in His own image. Most of us are better, wiser, stronger, more competent now than we realize. Creating a better self-image does not create new abilities, talents, powers—it releases and utilizes them. We can change our personality, but not our basic self. Personality is a tool, an outlet, a focal point of the “self” that we use in dealing with the world. It is the sum total of our habits, attitudes, learned skills, which we use as a method of expressing ourselves.
We must recognize our mistakes and shortcomings before we can correct them. The first step toward acquiring knowledge is the recognition of those areas where you are ignorant. The first step toward becoming stronger is the recognition that you are weak. And all religions teach that the first step toward salvation is the self-confession that you are a sinner. In the journey toward the goal of ideal self-expression, we must use negative feedback data to correct course, as in any other goal-striving situation. This requires admitting to ourselves—and accepting the fact—that our personality, our expressed self, or what some psychologists call our “actual self,” is always imperfect and short of the mark.
No one ever succeeds during a lifetime in fully expressing or bringing into actuality all the potentialities of the real self. In our actual, expressed self, we never exhaust all the possibilities and powers of the real self. We can always learn more, perform better, behave better. The actual self is necessarily imperfect. Throughout life it is always moving toward an ideal goal, but never arriving. The actual self is not a static but a dynamic thing. It is never completed and final, but always in a state of growth.
Prescription: Accept yourself as you are—and start from there. Learn to emotionally tolerate imperfection in yourself. It is necessary to intellectually recognize our shortcomings, but disastrous to hate ourselves because of them. Differentiate between your “self” and your behavior. “You” are neither ruined nor worthless because you made a mistake or got off course, any more than a typewriter is worthless that makes an error, or a violin that sounds a sour note. Don’t hate yourself because you’re not perfect. You have a lot of company. No one else is, either, and those who try to pretend they are are kidding themselves.
“It is the young man of little faith who says, ‘I am nothing,’” said Edward W. Bok (who was editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal for many years). “It is the young man of true conception who says, ‘I am everything,’ and then goes to prove it. That does not spell conceit or egotism, and if people think it does, let them think so. It is enough for us to know that it means faith, trust, confidence, the human expression of the God within us. He says, ‘Do my work.’ Go and do it. No matter what it is. Do it, but do it with a zest; a keenness; a gusto that surmounts obstacles and brushes aside discouragement.” Accept yourself. Be yourself. You cannot realize the potentialities and possibilities inherent in that unique and special something that is “YOU” if you keep turning your back on it, feeling ashamed of it, hating it, or refusing to recognize it.
They are: Frustration, hopelessness, futility Aggressiveness (misdirected) Insecurity Loneliness (lack of “oneness”) Uncertainty Resentment Emptiness
Frustration is an emotional feeling that develops whenever some important goal cannot be realized or when some strong desire is thwarted. All of us must necessarily suffer some frustration by the very fact of being human and therefore imperfect, incomplete, unfinished. As we grow older we should learn that all desires cannot be satisfied immediately. We also learn that our “doing” can never be as good as our intentions.
Chronic frustration usually means that the goals we have set for ourselves are unrealistic, or the image we have of ourselves is inadequate, or both.
Thoughts and feelings go together. Feelings are the soil that thoughts and ideas grow in. This is the reason that you have been advised throughout this book to imagine how you would feel if you succeeded—and then feel that way now.
Excessive and misdirected aggressiveness follows frustration as night follows day. This was proved conclusively by a group of Yale scientists many years ago in their book Frustration and Aggressiveness.
Aggressiveness—along with emotional steam—is very necessary in reaching a goal. We must go out after what we want in an aggressive rather than in a defensive or tentative manner. We must grapple with problems aggressively. The mere fact of having an important goal is enough to create emotional steam in our boiler and bring aggressive tendencies into play. However, trouble ensues when we are blocked or frustrated in achieving our goal. The emotional steam is then dammed up, seeking an outlet. Misdirected, or unused, it becomes a destructive force. The worker who wants to punch his boss in the nose, but doesn’t dare, goes home and snaps at his wife and kids or kicks the cat.
providing a proper outlet for aggression is as important, if not more so, than providing for love and tenderness.
When you see that your response is inappropriate, you have gone a long way toward controlling it. It also takes much of the sting away, when someone is rude to you, if you realize that it is probably not a willful act, but an automatic mechanism at work. The other fellow is letting off steam that he could not use in achieving some goal. Many automobile accidents are caused by the frustration-aggression mechanism. The next time someone is rude to you in traffic, try this: Instead of becoming aggressive and thus a menace yourself, say to yourself: “The poor fellow has nothing against me personally. Maybe he burned the toast this morning, he can’t pay the rent, or his boss chewed him out.”
You need a safety valve for your excess of emotional steam. All types of physical exercise are excellent for draining off aggression. Long brisk walks, push-ups, and dumbbell exercises are good. Especially good are those games where you hit or smash something—golf, tennis, bowling, punching the bag. Many frustrated people intuitively recognize the value of heavy muscular exercise in draining off aggressiveness when they feel an urge to rearrange all the furniture in the house after becoming upset. Another good device is to vent your spleen in writing. Write a letter to the person who has frustrated or angered you. Pull out all the stops. Leave nothing to the imagination. Then burn the letter.
The feeling of insecurity is based on a concept or belief of inner inadequacy. If you feel that you do not “measure up” to what is required, you feel insecure.
The insecure person feels that he should be good—period. He should be successful—period. He should be happy, competent, poised—period. These are all worthy goals. But they should be thought of, at least in their absolute sense, as goals to be achieved, as something to reach for, rather than as shoulds. Since man is a goal-striving mechanism, the self realizes itself fully only when man is moving forward toward something. Remember our comparison with the bicycle in a previous chapter? Man maintains his balance, poise, and sense of security only as he is moving forward—or seeking.
The man who is convinced that he is “good” in the absolute sense, not only has no incentive to do better, but he feels insecure because he must defend the sham and pretense. “The man who thinks that he has ‘arrived’ has about used up his usefulness to us,” the president of a large business said to me recently. When someone called Jesus “good,” he admonished him, “Why callest thou me good? There is but one good and that is the Father.” St. Paul is generally regarded as a “good” man, yet his own attitude was “I count myself not to have achieved . . . but I press on toward the goal.”
KEEP YOUR FEET ON SOLID GROUND Trying to stand on the top of a pinnacle is insecure. Mentally, get down off your high horse and you will feel more secure. This has very practical applications. It explains the underdog psychology in sports. When a championship team begins to think of itself as “the champions,” they no longer have something to fight for, but a status to defend. The champions are defending something, trying to prove something. The underdogs are fighting to do something and often bring about an upset.
A wise manager said to him, “You can fight as well as champion as when you’re the contender if you’ll remember one thing. When you step into that ring you aren’t defending the championship—you’re fighting for it. You haven’t got it—you’ve laid it on the line when you crawl through the ropes.”
In fact, if you are caught trying real hard, it may be considered evidence that you are not superior—so you don’t try. You lose your fight—your will to win.
The lonely person often sets up a vicious cycle. Because of his feeling of alienation from self, human contacts are not very satisfying, and he becomes a social recluse. In doing so, he cuts himself off from one of the pathways to finding himself, which is to lose oneself in social activities with other people. Doing things with other people, and enjoying things with other people, helps us to forget ourselves. In stimulating conversation, dancing, playing together, or working together for a common goal, we become interested in something other than maintaining our own shams and pretenses.
The lonely personality is afraid of other people. The lonely person often complains that he has no friends, and there are no people to mix with. In most cases, he unwittingly arranges things in this manner because of his passive attitude, that it is up to other people to come to him, to make the first move, to see that he is entertained. It never occurs to him that he should contribute something to any social situation. Regardless of your feelings, force yourself to mix and mingle with other people. After the first cold plunge, you will find yourself warming up and enjoying it if you persist. Develop some social skill that will add to the happiness of other people: dancing, bridge, playing the piano, tennis, conversation.
Uncertainty is a way of avoiding mistakes, and responsibility. It is based on the fallacious premise that if no decision is made, nothing can go wrong. Being “wrong” holds untold horrors to the person who tries to conceive of himself as perfect. He is never wrong, and always perfect in all things. If he were ever wrong, his picture of a perfect, all-powerful self would crumble. Therefore, decision-making becomes a life-or-death matter.
is in the nature of things that we progress by acting, making mistakes, and correcting course. A guided torpedo literally arrives at its target by making a series of mistakes and continually correcting its course. You cannot correct your course if you are standing still. You cannot change or correct “nothing.” You must consider the known facts in a situation, imagine possible consequences of various courses of action, choose one that seems to offer the best solution—and bet on it. You can correct your course as you go.
Resentment is also a way of making us feel important. Many people get a perverse satisfaction from feeling “wronged.” The victim of injustice, the one who has been unfairly treated, is morally superior to those who caused the injustice.
Resentment, even when based on real injustices and wrongs, is not the way to win. It soon becomes an emotional habit. Habitually feeling that you are a victim of injustice, you begin to picture yourself in the role of a victimized person. You carry around an inner feeling that is looking for an external peg to hang itself on.
Habitual resentment invariably leads to self-pity, which is the worst possible emotional habit anyone can develop. When these habits have become firmly ensconced, a person does not feel “right” or “natural” when resentments are absent. They then literally begin to search for and look for “injustices.” Someone has said that such people feel good only when they are miserable. Emotional habits of resentment and self-pity also go with an ineffective, inferior self-image. You begin to picture yourself as a pitiful person, a victim, who was meant to be unhappy.
The resentful person turns over his reins to other people. They are allowed to dictate how he shall feel, how he shall act. He is wholly dependent on other people, just as a beggar is. He makes unreasonable demands and claims on other people. If everyone else should be dedicated to making you happy, you will be resentful when it doesn’t work out that way. If you feel that other people “owe” you eternal gratitude, undying appreciation, or continual recognition of your superlative worth, you will feel resentment when these “debts” are not paid. If life owes you a living, you become resentful when it isn’t forthcoming.
The truth is that joy is an accompaniment of creative function, of creative goal-striving. It is possible to win a fake “success,” but when you do you are penalized with an empty joy.
Glance at Negatives, but Focus on Positives
It is a well-known psychological fact that the people who become offended the easiest have the lowest self-esteem. We are “hurt” by those things we conceive of as threats to our ego or self-esteem. Fancied emotional thrusts that go by unnoticed by the person with wholesome self-esteem slice these people up terribly. Even real “digs” and “cuts,” which inflict a terrible injury to the ego of the person with low self-esteem, do not make a dent in the ego of the person who thinks well of himself. It is the person who feels undeserving, doubts his own capabilities, and has a poor opinion of himself who becomes jealous at the drop of a hat. It is the person who secretly doubts his own worth, and who feels insecure within himself, who sees threats to his ego where there are none, who exaggerates and overestimates the potential damage from real threats.
The person with the hard, gruff exterior usually develops it because instinctively he realizes that he is so soft inside that he needs protection.
Someone has said that the neurotic personality is forever “bumping into” reality. Develop a more self-reliant attitude. Assume responsibility for your own life and emotional needs. Try giving affection, love, approval, acceptance, understanding to other people, and you will find them coming back to you as a sort of reflex action.
Your forgiveness should be forgotten, as well as the wrong which was forgiven. Forgiveness that is remembered, and dwelt upon, reinfects the wound you are attempting to cauterize. If you are too proud of your forgiveness, or remember it too much, you are very apt to feel that the other person owes you something for forgiving him.
John Tillotson, the seventeenth-century archbishop of Canterbury, said, “A more glorious victory cannot be gained over another man than this, that when the injury began on his part, the kindness should begin on ours.” This is just another way of saying that forgiveness itself can be used as an effective weapon of revenge—which it can. Revengeful forgiveness, however, is not therapeutic forgiveness. Therapeutic forgiveness cuts out, eradicates, cancels, makes the wrong as if it had never been. Therapeutic forgiveness is like surgery.
First, the “wrong”—and particularly our own feeling of condemnation of it—must be seen as an undesirable thing rather than a desirable thing. Before a man can agree within himself to have his arm amputated, he must cease to see his arm as a desirable thing to be retained, but as an undesirable, damaging, and threatening thing to be given up.
Jesus asked the woman—“ Hath no man condemned thee?” When she answered in the negative, he said, “Neither do I condemn thee—go and sin no more.” You cannot forgive a person unless you have first condemned him. Jesus never condemned the woman in the first place—so there was nothing for him to forgive. He recognized her sin or her mistake, but did not feel called upon to hate her for it. He was able to see, before the fact, what you and I must see after the fact in practicing therapeutic forgiveness: that we ourselves err when we hate a person because of his mistakes, or when we condemn him, or classify him as a certain type of person, confusing his person with his behavior; or when we mentally incur a debt that the other person must “pay” before being restored to our good graces, and our emotional acceptance.
Emotions are used correctly and appropriately when they help us to respond or react appropriately to some reality in the present environment. Since we cannot live in the past, we cannot appropriately react emotionally to the past. The past can be simply written off, closed, forgotten, insofar as our emotional reactions are concerned. We do not need to take an “emotional position” one way or the other regarding detours that might have taken us off course in the past. The important thing is our present direction and our present goal.
Who Wants to Be an Oyster?
An oyster is never “hurt.” He has a thick shell that protects him from everything. He is isolated. An oyster is secure, but not creative. He cannot “go after” what he wants—he must wait for it to come to him. An oyster knows none of the “hurts” of emotional communication with his environment—but neither can an oyster know the joys.
So why not give yourself a face-lift? Your do-it-yourself kit consists of relaxation of negative tensions to prevent scars, therapeutic forgiveness to remove old scars, providing yourself with a tough (but not a hard) epidermis instead of a shell, creative living, a willingness to be a little vulnerable, and a nostalgia for the future instead of the past.
What we call “personality” is the outward evidence of that unique and individual creative self, made in the image of God—that spark of divinity within us—or what might be called the free and full expression of your real self.
When we say that a person “has a good personality,” what we really mean is that he has freed and released the creative potential within him and is able to express his real self. “Poor personality” and “inhibited personality” are one and the same. The person with a “poor personality” does not express the creative self within. He has restrained it, handcuffed it, locked it up and thrown away the key. The word “inhibit” literally means to stop, prevent, prohibit, restrain. The inhibited personality has imposed a restraint on the expression of the real self. For one reason or another he is afraid to express himself, afraid to be himself, and has locked up his real self within an inner prison.
If negative feedback is working properly, a missile or a torpedo reacts to “criticism” just enough to correct course, and keeps going forward toward the target. This course will be, as we have previously explained, a series of zigzags. However, if the mechanism is too sensitive to negative feedback, the servo-mechanism overcorrects. Instead of progressing toward the target, it will perform exaggerated lateral zigzags, or stop forward progress altogether. Our own built-in servo-mechanism works in the same way. We must have negative feedback in order to operate purposefully, in order to steer our way, or be guided to a goal.
While most of us are not consciously aware of the fact, when we talk we receive negative feedback data through our ears by listening to or “monitoring” our own voice. This is the reason that totally deaf individuals seldom speak well.
Thus, negative feedback itself is no bar or handicap to speech. On the contrary, it enables us to speak and speak correctly. Voice teachers advise that we record our own voices and listen back to them as a method of improving tone, enunciation, etc. By doing this we become aware of errors in speech that we had not noticed before. We are able to see clearly what it is we are doing “wrong”—and we can make correction.
When excessive negative feedback, or self-criticism, was eliminated, inhibition disappeared and performance improved. When there was no time for worry, or too much “carefulness” in advance, expression immediately improved. This gives us a valuable clue as to how we may disinhibit or release a locked up personality, and improve performance in other areas.
Excessive Carefulness Leads to Inhibition and Anxiety
Attempting to pour a liquid into the mouth of a very small-necked bottle often results in the same kind of behavior. You can hold your hand perfectly steady, until you try to accomplish your purpose, then for some strange reason you quiver and shake. In medical circles, we call this “purpose tremor.”
Excessive carefulness, or being too anxious not to make an error, is a form of excessive negative feedback. As in the case of the stutterer, who attempts to anticipate possible errors and be overly careful not to make them—the result is inhibition and deterioration of performance. Excessive carefulness and anxiety are close kin. Both have to do with too much concern for possible failure, or doing the “wrong thing,” and making too much of a conscious effort to do right. “I don’t like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything,” said Henry Ward Beecher.
The Value of Indifference
Prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall always be on tap; then in the classroom trust your spontaneity and fling away all further care.
“My advice to students, especially to girl students, would be somewhat similar. Just as a bicycle chain may be too tight, so may one’s carefulness and conscientiousness be so tense as to hinder the running of one’s mind. Take, for example, periods when there are many successive days of examination impending. One ounce of good nervous tone in an examination is worth many pounds of anxious study for it in advance. If you want really to do your best in an examination, fling away the book the day before, say to yourself, ‘I won’t waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don’t care an iota whether I succeed or not.’ Say this sincerely, and feel it, and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the method permanently.”
Self-Consciousness Is Really Others’ Consciousness
Mangan also found that he could overcome his stage fright and self-consciousness when calling on big shots, or in any other social situation, by saying to himself, “I’m going to eat with Ma and Pa,” conjuring up in his imagination how he had felt and how he had acted—and then acting that way. In his book The Knack of Selling Yourself, Mangan advised salesmen to use the “I’m going home to eat supper with my ma and pa! I’ve been through this a thousand times—nothing new can happen here” attitude in all sorts of new and strange situations.
“This attitude of being immune to strangers or strange situations, this total disregard for all the unknown or unexpected has a name. It is called poise. Poise is the deliberate shunting aside of all fears arising from new and uncontrollable circumstances.”
The Job of Your Conscience Is to Make You Happy—Not Miserable
It is appropriate to experience anger if there is a legitimate need to destroy an obstacle by sheer force and destructiveness. Properly directed and controlled, anger is an important element of courage.
Such a distorted and unrealistic conscience does indeed make cowards of us all. We can become overly sensitive, and become too carefully concerned with whether we “have a right” to succeed in even a worthwhile endeavor. We become too carefully concerned about whether or not “I deserve this.” Many people, inhibited by the wrong kind of conscience, “hold back” or “take a backseat” in any kind of endeavor, even in church activities. They secretly feel it would not be “right” for them to “hold themselves out” as a leader, or “presume to be somebody,” or they are overly concerned with whether other people might think they were “showing off.”
Here, the principle of cybernetics enters into the picture again. Our goal is an adequate, self-fulfilling, creative personality. The path to the goal is a course between too much inhibition and too little. When there is too much, we correct course by ignoring inhibition and practicing more disinhibition.
How to Tell Whether You Need Disinhibition
The “feedback” signals that can tell you whether you are off course because of too little inhibition are numerous, and include: You continually get yourself into trouble because of overconfidence. You habitually “rush in where angels fear to tread.” You habitually find yourself in hot water because of impulsive, ill-considered actions. You have projects backfire on you because you always practice “acting first and asking questions later.” You can never admit you’re wrong. You are a loud talker or a blabbermouth.
Don’t wonder in advance what you are going to say. Just open your mouth and say it. Improvise as you go along. (Jesus advises us to give no thought as to what we would say if delivered up to councils, but that the spirit would advise us what to say at the time.) Don’t plan (take no thought for tomorrow). Don’t think before you act. Act—and correct your actions as you go along. This advice may seem radical, yet it is actually the way all servo-mechanisms must work. A torpedo does not “think out” all its errors in advance, and attempt to correct them in advance. It must act first—start moving toward the goal—then correct any errors that may occur. “We cannot think first and act afterwards,” said A. N. Whitehead. “From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.”
Let people know when you like them. The inhibited personality is as afraid of expressing “good” feelings as bad ones. If he expresses love, he is afraid it will be judged sentimentality; if he expresses friendship, he is afraid it will be considered fawning or apple-polishing. If he compliments someone, he is afraid the other will think him superficial, or suspect an ulterior motive. Totally ignore these negative feedback signals. Compliment at least three people every day. If you like what someone is doing, or wearing, or saying—let them know it. Be direct. “I like that idea, Joe.” “Mary, that’s great work you did today.” “Jim, that proves to me you are a smart person.” And if you’re married, just say to your spouse, “I love you” at least twice a day.
Remember in Chapter 7, we said that our own feelings do not depend on externals, but on our own attitudes, reactions, and responses? Tranquilizers offer convincing evidence of this fact. In substance they reduce or tone down our over-response to negative feedback.
Let us suppose that as you read this, you are sitting quietly in your den. Suddenly, the telephone rings. From habit and experience, this is a “signal,” or stimulus, that you have learned to obey. Without taking thought, without making a conscious decision about the matter, you respond to it. You jump up from your comfortable seat and hurry to the telephone. The outside stimulus has had the effect of “moving” you. It has changed your mental set and your “position” or self-determined course of action. You were all set to spend the hour sitting quietly and relaxed, reading. You were inwardly organized for this. Now all this is suddenly changed by your response to the external stimulus in the environment. The point I wish to make is this: You do not have to answer the telephone. You do not have to obey. You can, if you choose, totally ignore the telephone bell. You can, if you choose, continue sitting quietly and relaxed—maintaining your own original state of organization, by refusing to respond to the signal. Get this mental picture clearly in your mind for it can be quite helpful in overcoming the power of external stimuli to disturb you. See yourself sitting quietly, letting the phone ring, ignoring its signal, unmoved by its command. Although you are aware of it, you no longer mind or obey it. Also, get clearly in your mind the fact that the outside signal in itself has no power over you; no power to move you. In the past you have obeyed it, responded to it, purely out of…
A key thought that we can carry with us to use whenever we are confronted by any disturbing stimulus is to say to ourselves, “The telephone is ringing, but I do not have to answer it. I can just let it ring.” This thought will “key in” to your mental picture of yourself sitting quietly, relaxed, unresponding, doing nothing, letting the telephone ring unheeded, and will act as a trigger or “clue” to call up the same attitude that you had when letting the telephone ring.
It is well to get clearly in your mind the fact that our disturbed feelings—our anger, hostility, fear, anxiety, insecurity—are caused by our own responses, not by externals. Response means tension. Lack of response means relaxation. It has been proved in scientific laboratory experiments that you absolutely cannot feel angry, fearful, anxious, insecure, “unsafe” as long as your muscles remain perfectly relaxed. All these things are, in essence, our own feelings. Tension in muscles is a “preparation for action” or a “getting ready to respond.” Relaxation of muscles brings about “mental relaxation,” or a peaceful “relaxed attitude.” Thus, relaxation is nature’s own tranquilizer, which erects a psychic screen or umbrella between you and the disturbing stimulus.
Build Yourself a Quiet Room in Your Mind
“Men seek retreats for themselves: houses in the country, sea-shores and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much,” said Marcus Aurelius. “But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere, either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble, does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquility; and I affirm that tranquility is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind. Constantly then give to thyself this retreat, and renew thyself.”
One of the most beneficial prescriptions that I have ever given patients is the advice to learn to return into this quiet, tranquil center. And one of the best ways that I have found for entering this quiet center is to build for yourself, in imagination, a little mental room. Furnish this room with whatever is most restful and refreshing to you: perhaps beautiful landscapes, if you like paintings; a volume of your favorite verse, if you like poetry. The colors of the walls are your own favorite “pleasant” colors, but should be chosen from the restful hues of blue, light green, yellow, gold. The room is plainly and simply furnished; there are no distracting elements. It is very neat and everything is in order. Simplicity, quietness, beauty are the keynotes. It contains your favorite easy chair. From one small window you can look out and see a beautiful beach. The waves roll in upon the beach and retreat, but you cannot hear them, for your room is very, very quiet. Take as much care in building this room in your imagination as you would in building an actual room. Be thoroughly familiar with every detail.
Just a very few minutes taken from a very busy day in this manner will more than pay for themselves. It is not time wasted, but time invested. Say to yourself, “I am going to rest a bit in my quiet room.” Then, in imagination, see yourself climbing the stairs to your room. Say to yourself, “I am now climbing the stairs—now I am opening the door—now I am inside.” In imagination notice all the quiet, restful details. See yourself sitting down in your favorite chair, utterly relaxed and at peace with the world. Your room is secure. Nothing can touch you here. There is nothing to worry about. You left your worries at the foot of the stairs. There are no decisions to be made here—no hurry, no bother.
I didn’t have a geyser, or a steam valve in the top of my head, but I did have an imagination. So I began to use this mental picture when I would retire into my mental quiet room. I would remember Old Faithful, and form a mental picture of emotional steam and pressure coming out the top of my head and evaporating harmlessly. Try this mental picture on yourself when you’re “wrought up” or tense. The ideas of “blowing off steam” and “blowing your top” have powerful associations built into your mental machinery.
Not satisfied with over-responding to actual minor stimuli in the actual environment, many of us create straw men in our imaginations, and emotionally respond to our own mental pictures. In addition to those negatives that actually exist in the environment, we impose our own negatives: This or that may happen; what if such and such happens? When we worry, we form mental pictures—adverse mental pictures—of what may exist in the environment, of what may happen. We then respond to these negative pictures as if they are present reality. Remember, your nervous system cannot tell the difference between a real experience and one that is vividly imagined.
You create a built-in tranquilizer, or psychic screen between yourself and the disturbing stimulus, when you practice “not responding”—letting the telephone ring.
You cure old habits of over-response, you extinguish old conditioned reflexes, when you practice delaying the habitual, automatic, and unthinking response.
Relaxation is nature’s own tranquilizer. Relaxation is non-response. Learn physical relaxation by daily practice; then when you need to practice non-response in daily activities, just “do what you’re doing” when you relax.
Use the “quiet room in your mind” technique both as a daily tranquilizer to tone down nervous response and to clear your emotional mechanism of “carry-over” emotions that would be inappropriate in a new situation.
Stop scaring yourself to death with your own mental pictures. Stop fighting straw men. Emotionally, respond only to what actually is, here and now—and ignore the rest.
Create in your imagination a vivid mental picture of yourself sitting quietly, composed, unmoved, letting your telephone ring, as outlined earlier in this chapter. Then, in your daily activities “carry-over” the same peaceful, composed, unmoved attitude by remembering this mental picture. Say to yourself, “I am letting the telephone ring,” whenever you are tempted to “obey” or respond to some fear-bell or anxiety-bell. Next, use your imagination to practice non-response in various sorts of situations: See yourself sitting quietly and unmoved while an associate rants and raves. See yourself going through your daily tasks one by one, calmly, composed, unhurried, in spite of the pressures of a busy day. See yourself maintaining the same constant, stable course, in spite of the various hurry-bells and pressure-bells in your environment. See yourself in various situations that have in the past upset you, only now you remain “set,” settled, poised—by not responding.
The moral is obvious for either mice or men: Practice without pressure and you will learn more efficiently and be able to perform better in a crisis situation.
Billy Graham preached sermons to cypress stumps in a Florida swamp before developing his compelling platform personality with live audiences. Most good public speakers have done the same thing in one way or another. The most common form of shadowboxing for public speakers is to deliver their speech to their own image in the mirror. One man I know lines up six or eight empty chairs, imagines people sitting in them, and practices his speech on the imaginary audience.
The technique of “shadowboxing,” or “practice without pressure,” is so simple, and the results often so striking, that some people are inclined to associate it with some sort of magic.
In shadowboxing you practice self-expression with no inhibiting factors present. You learn the correct moves. You form a “mental map” that is retained in memory. You create a broad, general, flexible map. Then, when you face a crisis where an actual menace or inhibiting factor is present, you have learned to act calmly and correctly. There is a “carry-over” in your muscles, nerves, and brain from practice to the actual situation. Moreover, because your learning has been relaxed and pressure-free, you will be able to rise to the occasion, extemporize, improvise, act spontaneously. At the same time, your shadowboxing is building a mental image of yourself—acting correctly and successfully. The memory of this successful self-image also enables you to perform better.
THE SALESMAN WHO PRACTICED “NOT SELLING”
You can use the same technique to “hit the ball” in selling, teaching, or running a business. A young salesman complained to me that he froze up when calling on prospects. His one big trouble was his inability to properly reply to the prospect’s objections. “When a prospect raises an objection or criticizes my product—I can’t think of a thing to say at the time,” he said. “Later, I can think of all kinds of good ways to handle the objection.” I told him about shadowboxing and about the kid who learned to bat by letting the ball go by with the bat on his shoulder. I pointed out that to hit a baseball—or to think on your feet—requires good reflexes. Your automatic Success Mechanism must respond appropriately and automatically. Too much tension, too much motivation, too much anxiety for results, jams the mechanism. “You think of the proper answers later because you’re relaxed and the pressure is off. Right now your trouble is you’re not responding quickly and spontaneously to the objections your prospects throw at you—in other words, you’re not hitting the ball that the prospect throws.”
I told him first of all to practice a number of imaginary interviews—actually walking in, introducing himself to a prospect, making his sales pitch—then imagine every possible objection, no matter how screwballish, and answer it out loud. Next, he was to practice “with his bat on his shoulder” on an actual live client. He was to go in with an “empty gun” as far as intents and purposes were concerned. The purpose of the sales interview would not be to sell—he had to resign himself to being satisfied with no order. The purpose of the call would be strictly practice—bat-on-the-shoulder, empty-gun practice. In his own words, this shadowboxing “worked like a miracle.”
The word “crisis” comes from a Greek word that means, literally, “decisiveness,” or “point of decision.” A crisis is a fork in the road. One fork holds a promise of a better condition—the other of a worse condition.
“I always think about what I am going to do, and what I want to happen,” he said, “instead of what the batter is going to do, or what may happen to me.” He said he concentrated on what he wanted to happen, felt that he could make it happen, and that it usually did. This same attitude is another important key to reacting well in any crisis situation. If we can maintain an aggressive attitude, react aggressively instead of negatively to threats and crises, the very situation itself can act as a stimulus to release untapped powers.
This means maintaining an aggressive, goal-directed attitude, rather than a defensive, evasive, negative one: No matter what happens, I can handle it, or I can see it through, rather than I hope nothing happens.
But to accomplish this, you must supply the goal. And to supply a goal capable of activating your Creative Mechanism, you must think of the end result in terms of a present possibility. The possibility of the goal must be seen so clearly that it becomes “real” to your brain and nervous system. So real, in fact, that the same feelings are evoked as would be present if the goal were already achieved.
If there is one simple secret to the operation of your unconscious Creative Mechanism, it is this: call up, capture, evoke the feeling of success. When you feel successful and self-confident, you will act successfully. When the feeling is strong, you can literally do no wrong. The “winning feeling” itself does not cause you to operate successfully, but is more in the nature of a sign or symptom that you are geared for success. It is more like a thermometer, which does not cause the heat in the room but measures it. However, we can use this thermometer in a very practical way. Remember: When you experience that winning feeling, your internal machinery is set for success.
Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard (1869–1909), made a speech on what he called the “Habit of Success.” Many failures in elementary schools, he said, were due to the fact that students were not given, at the very beginning, a sufficient amount of work at which they could succeed, and thus never had an opportunity to develop the “Atmosphere of Success,” or what we call “the winning feeling.” The student, he said, who had never experienced success early in his school life, had no chance to develop the “habit of success”—the habitual feeling of faith and confidence in undertaking new work. He urged that teachers arrange work in the early grades so as to insure that the student experienced success. The work should be well within the ability of the student, yet interesting enough to arouse enthusiasm and motivation. These small successes, said Dr. Eliot, would give the student the “feel of success,” which would be a valuable ally in all future undertakings.
Gradualness Is the Secret
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Weight lifters start with weights they can lift and gradually increase the weights over a period of time. Good fight managers start a new boxer off with easy opponents and gradually pit him against more experienced fighters. We can apply the same general principles in almost any field of endeavor. The principle is merely to start with an “opponent” over which you can succeed, and gradually take on more and more difficult tasks.
Even in those areas where we have already developed a high degree of skill, it sometimes helps to “drop back,” lower our sights a bit, and practice with a feeling of ease. This is especially true when one reaches a “sticking point” in progress, where effort for additional progress is unavailing. Continually straining to go beyond the “sticking point” is likely to develop undesirable “feeling habits” of strain, difficulty, effort.
Go back in memory and relive those successful experiences. In your imagination revive the entire picture in as much detail as you can. In your mind’s eye “see” not only the main event, but all the little incidental things that accompanied your success. What sounds were there? What about your environment? What else was happening around you at the time? What objects were present? What time of year was it? Were you cold or hot? And so forth. The more detailed you can make it, the better. If you can remember in sufficient detail just what happened when you were successful at some time in the past, you will find yourself feeling just as you felt then. Try to particularly remember your feelings at the time. If you can remember your feelings from the past, they will be reactivated in the present. You will find yourself feeling self-confident, because self-confidence is built upon memories of past successes. Now, after arousing this “general feeling of success,” give your thoughts to the important sale, conference, speech, business deal, golf tournament, or whatever that you wish to succeed in now. Use your Creative Imagination to picture to yourself just how you would act and just how you would feel if you had already succeeded.
If we react to negative feelings aggressively and positively, they become challenges, which will automatically arouse more power and more ability within us. The idea of difficulty, threat, menace, arouses additional strength within us if we react to it aggressively rather than passively. In the last chapter, we saw that a certain amount of “excitement”—if interpreted correctly and employed correctly—helps, rather than hinders, performance.
An associate of Henry J. Kaiser’s said, “If you don’t want Henry to do a thing, you had better not make the mistake of telling him it can’t be done or that he can’t do it—for he will then do it or bust.” It is not only possible, but entirely practicable, to react in the same aggressive, positive manner to the “negative advice” of our own feelings as we can and should when the negative advice comes from others.
Jesus warned us about sweeping the mind clean of one demon, only to have seven new ones move in if we left the house empty. He also advised us not to resist evil, but to overcome evil with good.
David Seabury, founder of the Centralist School of Psychology, said that the best piece of advice his father ever gave him was to practice positive mental imagery—immediately and “on cue,” so to speak—whenever he became aware of negative feelings. Negative feelings literally defeated themselves by becoming a sort of “bell” that set off a conditioned reflex to arouse positive states of mind.
Drs. Eccles and Sherrington tell us that the engrams in the human brain tend to change slightly each time they are “played back.” They take on some of the tone and temper of our present mood, thinking, and attitudes toward them. Also, each individual neuron may become a part of perhaps 100 separate and distinct patterns—much as an individual tree in an orchard may form a part of a square, a rectangle, a triangle, and any number of larger squares, etc. The neuron in the original engram, of which it was a part, takes on some of the characteristics of subsequent engrams of which it becomes a part, and in so doing, changes somewhat the original engram. This is not only very interesting, but encouraging. It gives us reason to believe that adverse and unhappy childhood experiences, “traumas,” etc., are not as permanent and as fatal as some earlier psychologists would have had us believe. We now know that not only does the past influence the present, but that the present clearly influences the past. In other words, we are not doomed or damned by the past. Because we did have unhappy childhood experiences and traumas that left engrams behind does not mean that we are at the mercy of these engrams, or that our patterns of behavior are “set,” predetermined and unchangeable. Our present thinking, our present mental habits, our attitudes toward past experiences, and our attitudes toward the future—all have an influence upon old recorded engrams. The old can be changed, modified,…
They go a long way toward restoring the dignity of man as a responsible child of God, able to cope with his past and plan his future, as opposed to the image of man as helpless victim of his past experiences. The new concept does carry a responsibility, however. No longer can you derive sickly comfort from blaming your parents, society, your early experiences, or the injustices of “others” for your present troubles. These things may and should help you understand how you got where you are. Blaming them, or even yourself, for the past mistakes, however, will not solve your problem, or improve your present or your future. There is no merit in blaming yourself. The past explains how you got here. But where you go from here is your responsibility. The choice is yours. Like a broken phonograph, you can keep on playing the same old “broken record” of the past; reliving past injustices; pitying yourself for past mistakes—all of which reactivates failure patterns and failure feelings that color your present and your future. Or, if you choose, you can put on a new record, and reactivate success patterns and “that winning feeling,” which help you do better in the present and promise a more enjoyable future.
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When your phonograph is playing music you don’t like, you do not try to force it to do better. You do not use effort or willpower. You do not bang the phonograph around. You do not try to change the music itself. You merely change the record being played and the music takes care of itself. Use the same technique on the “music” that comes out of your own internal machine. Don’t pit your will directly against the music. As long as the same mental imagery (the cause) occupies your attention, no amount of effort will change the music (the result). Instead, try putting a new record on. Change your mental imagery, and the feelings will take care of themselves.
William James once said that everyone, the scientist included, develops his own “over-beliefs” concerning known facts, which the facts themselves do not justify. As a practical measure, these “over-beliefs” are not only permissible, but necessary. Our assumption of a future goal, which sometimes we cannot see, is what dictates our present actions, and our “practical conduct.” Columbus had to assume that a great landmass lay to the westward before he could discover it. Otherwise he would not have sailed at all—or having sailed, would not have known whether to set his course to the south, east, north, or west.
I do not believe, however, that a human is a machine. I believe that the essence of man is that which animates this machine, that which inhabits the machine, directs and controls it, and uses it as a vehicle. Humans are not machines, any more than electricity is the wire over which it flows or the motor that it turns. I believe that the essence of humanity is extraphysical.
in the marginyiubhave a hunch first and then yiuvsetv out to prove it
It was also fairly obvious that the source of this basic energy—whatever it might be—was something other than the surface energy we obtain from the food we eat. Caloric energy does not explain why one individual can snap back quickly from a serious operation, withstand long continued stress situations, or outlive another. We speak of such persons as having a “strong constitution.” The strong constitution exhibited by individuals who live long and live well seems linked to elements over which we have considerable control, not the least of which is the never-ending setting and resetting of goals, so that we have something meaningful to live for.
There was, however, one easily recognizable characteristic that all the rapid healers had in common. They were optimistic, cheerful positive thinkers who not only expected to get well in a hurry, but invariably had some compelling reason or need to get well quick. They had something to look forward to and not only something to live for, but something to get well for. “I’ve got to get back on the job.” “I’ve got to get out of here so I can accomplish my goal.” In short, they epitomized those characteristics and attitudes that I have previously described as the Success Mechanism.
Dr. John Schindler, in his book How to Live 365 Days a Year, pointed out what he believed to be six basic needs that every human being has: 1. The Need for Love 2. The Need for Security 3. The Need for Creative Expression 4. The Need for Recognition 5. The Need for New Experiences 6. The Need for Self-Esteem To these six, I would add another basic need: the need for more life. The need to look forward to tomorrow and to the future with gladness and anticipation.
I believe that life itself is adaptive; that life is not just an end in itself, but a means to an end. Life is one of the “means” we are privileged to use, in various ways, to achieve important goals. We can see this principle operating in all forms of life, from the amoeba to man. The polar bear, for example, needs a thick fur coat in order to survive in a cold environment. He needs protective coloration to stalk game and hide from enemies. The life force acts as a “means” to these ends, and provides the polar bear with his white fur coat.
If life adapts itself in so many varied forms to act as a means toward an end, is it not reasonable to assume that if we place ourselves in the sort of goal-situation where more life is needed, that we will receive more life? If we think of man as a goal-striver, we can think of adaptation energy or life force as the propelling fuel or energy that drives him forward toward his goal. A stored automobile needs no gasoline in the tank. And a goal-striver with no goals doesn’t really need much life force. I believe that we establish this need by looking forward to the future with joy and anticipation, when we expect to enjoy tomorrow, and above all, when we have something important (to us) to do and somewhere to go.
Creativity is certainly one of the characteristics of the life force. And the essence of creativity is a looking forward toward a goal. Creative people need more life force. And actuary tables seem to confirm that they get it. As a group, creative workers—research scientists, inventors, painters, writers, philosophers—not only live longer, but remain productive longer than non-creative workers. (Michelangelo did some of his best painting when past 80; Goethe wrote Faust when past 80; Edison was still inventing at 90; Picasso dominated the art world well into his 90s; Wright at 90 was still considered the most creative architect; Shaw was still writing plays at 90; Grandma Moses began painting at 79, and so on.)
“develop a nostalgia for the future” instead of for the past
Develop an enthusiasm for life, create a need for more life, and you will receive more life.
I believe that medical skill and medical discoveries are made possible by the same intelligence, the same life force, that operates through the media of faith healing. And for this reason I can see no possible conflict between medical science and religion. Medical healing and faith healing both derive from the same source, and should work together. No father who saw a mad dog attacking his child would stand idly by and say, “I must do nothing because I must prove my faith.” He would not refuse the assistance of a neighbor who brought a club or a gun. Yet, if you reduce the size of the mad dog trillions of times and call it a bacteria or a virus, the same father may refuse the help of his doctor-neighbor who brings a tool in the form of a capsule, a scalpel, or a syringe.
In the Bible we are told that when the prophet was in the desert and hungry, God lowered a sheet from the heavens containing food. Only to the prophet it didn’t look much like good food. It was “unclean” and contained all sorts of “crawling things.” Whereupon God rebuked him, admonishing him not to call “unclean” that which God had offered.
Another important channel is other people. Let us not refuse the help, happiness, and joy that others may bring us, or that we can give to them. Let us not be too proud to accept help from others, or too callous to give it. Let us not say “unclean” just because the form of the gift may not coincide with our prejudices or our ideas of self-importance.
It is an insult to our Creator to turn our backs upon these gifts or to say that his creation—man—is so “unclean” that he is not worthy or important or capable. The most adequate and realistic self-image of all is to conceive of yourself as “made in the image of God.” “You cannot believe yourself the image of God, deeply and sincerely, with full conviction, and not receive a new source of strength and power,” said Dr. Frank G. Slaughter.
Based on my own experience in this matter, as well as all the people I’ve coached over the years, I believe anyone would be better served without the rigid time frame. You could just begin to imagine the goal—and feel good about having it. You could imagine what you want, and when the action steps come to you, you follow through. Once you’ve taken these actions, you make progress. You may be surprised that you feel better and achieve your goal sooner than you’d expected. Why? Because you never had to fight a belief about when you were going to achieve your goal. You only had to convince yourself that you could and would achieve the goal. Your automatic guidance system never got jammed.