Adopt the motto, “It doesn’t matter who’s right, but what’s right.”
“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.
A step in the wrong direction is better than staying ‘on the spot’ all your life.
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.
Of all the traps and pitfalls in life, self-disesteem is the deadliest, and the hardest to overcome; for it is a pit designed and dug by our own hands, summed up in the phrase, “It’s no use. I can’t do it.”
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?
This appreciation of your own worth is not egotism unless you assume that you made yourself and should take some of the credit.
Yet, what do most of us do? We destroy our self-confidence by remembering past failures and forgetting all about past successes. We not only remember failures, we impress them on our minds with emotion.
Dr. Overholser recommended the practice of vividly remembering our past successes and brave moments as an invaluable aid whenever self-confidence is shaken.
The most miserable and tortured people in the world are those who are continually straining and striving to convince themselves and others that they are something other than what they basically are.
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.
Self-acceptance is easier, however, if we realize that these negatives belong to us—they are not us.
“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.
Say to yourself instead, “I may not be perfect, I may have faults and weaknesses, I might have gotten off the track, I may have a long way to go—but I am something and I will make the most of that something.”
Patients are prone to regard symptoms as malevolent; a fever, a pain, etc., is “bad.” Actually, these negative signals function for the patient, and for his benefit, if he recognizes them for what they are, and takes corrective action.
They are: Frustration, hopelessness, futility Aggressiveness (misdirected) Insecurity Loneliness (lack of “oneness”) Uncertainty Resentment Emptiness
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.
Expressing frustration, discontent, or dissatisfaction is a way of responding to problems that we all “learned” as infants. If an infant is hungry he expresses discontent by crying. A warm, tender hand then appears magically out of nowhere and brings milk.
All they have to do is feel frustrated and dissatisfied and the problem is solved.
Yet many of us continue to try it, by feeling discontented and expressing our grievances against life, apparently in the hope that life itself will take pity—rush in and solve our problem for us—if only we feel badly enough.
The answer to aggression is not to eradicate it, but to understand it, and provide proper and appropriate channels for its expression.
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 best channel of all for aggression is to use it up as it was intended to be used—in working toward some goal. Work remains one of the best therapies, and one of the best tranquilizers for a troubled spirit.
The great Babe Ruth, who held the record for the most home runs for many years, also held the record for the most strikeouts.
It is the person who has no purpose of his own who pessimistically concludes, “Life has no purpose.” It is the person who has no goal worth working for who concludes, “Life is not worthwhile.” It is the person with no important job to do who complains, “There is nothing to do.”
Real success never hurt anyone. It is healthy to strive for goals that are important to you, not as status symbols, but because they are consistent with your own deep inner wants.
We form emotional or spiritual “scars” for self-protection. We are very apt to become hardened of heart, callous toward the world, and to withdraw within a protective shell.
Self-fulfilled persons have the following characteristics: 1. They see themselves as liked, wanted, acceptable, and able individuals 2. They have a high degree of acceptance of themselves as they are. 3. They have a feeling of oneness with others. 4. They have a rich store of information and knowledge.
It is a well-known psychological fact that the people who become offended the easiest have the lowest self-esteem.
It wouldn’t be wise for our physical body to be covered over completely with a hard callus, or a shell like a turtle’s. We would be denied the pleasure of all sensual feeing. But our body does have a layer of outer skin, the epidermis, for the purpose of protecting us from invasion of bacteria, small bumps and bruises, and small pinpricks.
The person with the hard, gruff exterior usually develops it because instinctively he realizes that he is so soft inside that he needs protection.
Scientific experiments have shown that it is absolutely impossible to feel fear, anger, anxiety, or negative emotions of any kind while the muscles of the body are kept perfectly relaxed.
You alone are responsible for your responses and reactions. You do not have to respond at all. You can remain relaxed and free from injury.
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.
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.
We find it difficult to forgive only because we like our sense of condemnation. We get a perverse and morbid enjoyment out of nursing our wounds. As long as we can condemn another, we can feel superior to him.
True forgiveness comes only when we are able to see, and emotionally accept, that there is and was nothing for us to forgive.
We need to recognize our own errors as mistakes. Otherwise we could not correct course. “Steering” or “guidance” would be impossible. But it is futile and fatal to hate or condemn ourselves for our mistakes.
You Make Mistakes. Mistakes Do Not Make “You”
One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to confuse our behavior with our “self”
For example, to say “I failed” (verb form) is but to recognize an error and can help lead to future success. But to say “I am a failure” (noun form) does not describe what you did, but what you think the mistake did to you. This does not contribute to learning, but tends to “fixate” the mistake and make it permanent.
To trust, to love, to open ourselves to emotional communication with other people is to run the risk of being hurt. If we are hurt once, we can do one of two things. We can build a thick protective shell, or scar tissue, to prevent being hurt again, live like an oyster, and not be hurt. Or we can “turn the other cheek,” remain vulnerable, and go on living creatively.
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.
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. They have no way of knowing whether their voice is coming out as a shriek, a scream, or an unintelligible mumble.
To test his theory he equipped 25 severe stutterers with earphones through which a loud tone drowned out the sound of their own voices. When they were asked to read aloud from a prepared text under these conditions, which eliminated self-criticism, the improvement was “remarkable.”
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.”
The way to make a good impression on other people is: Never consciously “try” to make a good impression on them. Never act, or fail to act, purely for consciously contrived effect. Never “wonder” consciously what the other person is thinking of you, how he is judging you.
Mangan was able to use the memory of the ease he felt eating in his parents’ kitchen for anything else he wanted to do in a more relaxed way, even activities that were supposedly “unrelated.”
With Psycho-Cybernetics, any positive memory of poise from any situation will do the trick for any other situation, no matter how different it may be.
Don’t wonder in advance what you are going to say. Just open your mouth and say it. Improvise as you go along.
think before you act. Act—and correct your actions as you go along.
Recent experiments have shown that you can exert up to 15 percent more strength, and lift more weight, if you will shout, grunt, or groan loudly as you make the lift. The explanation of this is that loud shouting disinhibits and allows you to exert all your strength, including that which has been blocked off and tied up by inhibition.
Tranquilizers work because they greatly reduce, or eliminate, our own response to disturbing outside stimuli.
We are still able to recognize them intellectually, but we do not respond to them emotionally.
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.
Today, more than ever, it’s vital to address the bad habit of over-response—to relax from doing—when we are assaulted by the stimuli of email, texts, and all manner of electronic communications.
The word “conditioning” in psychological circles grew out of Pavlov’s well-known experiments where he “conditioned” a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell, by ringing it just before presenting food to the dog. This procedure was repeated many times. First, the sound of the bell. A few seconds later, the appearance of food. The dog “learned” to respond to the sound of the bell by salivating in anticipation of the food. Originally, the response made sense. The bell signified that food was forthcoming, and the dog got ready by salivating. However, after the process was repeated a number of times, the dog would continue to salivate whenever the bell was rung—whether or not food was immediately forthcoming. The dog had now become “conditioned” to salivate at the mere sound of the bell.
Strangers become “bells,” and the learned response becomes fear, avoidance, or the desire to run away.
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.”
Delaying the response breaks up, and interferes with, the automatic workings of conditioning. “Counting to ten” when you are tempted to become angry is based on the same principle, and is very good advice—if you count slowly, and in fact actually delay the response, rather than merely holding in your angry shouting or desk pounding. The “response” in anger consists of more than shouting or desk beating. The tension in your muscles is a response. You cannot “feel” the emotion of anger or fear if your muscles remain perfectly relaxed.
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.
Each person needs a quiet room inside his own mind—a quiet center within him, like the deep of the ocean that is never disturbed, no matter how rough the waves may become on the surface.
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:
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.”
Our nervous system needs a certain amount of escapism. It needs some freedom and protection from the continual bombardment of external stimuli.
the key to the matter of whether you are disturbed or tranquil, fearful or composed, is not the external stimulus, whatever it may be, but your own response and reaction.
Carry these thoughts with you as a sort of first aid kit: Inner disturbance, or the opposite of tranquility, is nearly always caused by over-response, a too sensitive “alarm reaction.” 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.
In order to perform well in a crisis: (1) We need to learn certain skills under conditions where we will not be over-motivated; we need to practice without pressure. (2) We need to learn to react to crises with an aggressive, rather than a defensive, attitude; to respond to the challenge in the situation, rather than to the menace; to keep our positive goal in mind. (3) We need to learn to evaluate so-called crisis situations in their true perspective; to not make mountains out of molehills, or react as if every small challenge is a matter of life or death.
Dr. Edward C. Tolman, psychologist and founder of the concept known as “latent learning,” said that both animals and men form “brain maps” or “cognitive maps” of the environment while they are learning. If the motivation is not too intense, if there is not too much of a crisis present in the learning situation, these maps are broad and general. If the animal is over-motivated, the cognitive map is narrow and restricted. He learns just one way of solving his problem.
The more intense the crisis situation under which you learn, the less you learn.
But you can take these same people and let them practice a “dry run” fire drill when there is no fire. Because there is no menace, there is no excessive negative feedback to interfere with clear thinking or correct doing.
Some athletes practice in private with as little pressure as possible.
Everything is arranged to make training and practice as relaxed and pressure-free as is humanly possible. The result is that they go into the crisis of actual competition without appearing to have any nerves at all. They become “human icicles,” immune to pressure, not worrying about how they will perform, but depending on “muscle memory” to execute the various motions that they have learned.
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.
SHADOWBOXING HELPS YOU HIT THE BALL
“How wonderful is the way in which, with quite ordinary folk, power leaps to our aid in any time of emergency,” he said. “We lead timid lives, shrinking from difficult tasks till perhaps we are forced into them or ourselves determine on them, and immediately we seem to unlock the unseen forces.
The secret lies in the attitude of fearlessly accepting the challenge, and confidently expending our strength. 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.
Prescott Lecky, author of Self-Consistency: A Theory of Personality, has said that the purpose of emotion is “re-inforcement,” or additional strength, rather than to serve as a sign of weakness. He believed that there was only one basic emotion—“excitement”—and that excitement manifests itself as fear, anger, courage, etc., depending on our own inner goals at the time—whether we are inwardly organized to conquer a problem, run away from it, or destroy it. “The real problem is not to control emotion,” wrote Lecky, “but to control the choice of which tendency shall receive emotional reinforcement.”
It is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of additional strength to be used in any way you choose. Jack Dempsey used to get so nervous before a fight, he couldn’t shave himself. His excitement was such that he couldn’t sit or stand still. He did not, however, interpret this excitement as fear. He did not decide that he should run away because of it. He went forward, and used the excitement to put extra dynamite into his blows.
“When some misfortune threatens, consider seriously and deliberately what is the very worst that could possibly happen. Having looked this possible misfortune in the face, give yourself sound reasons for thinking that after all it would be no such very terrible disaster. Such reasons always exist, since at the worst nothing that happens to oneself has any cosmic importance.
Someone has said that the greatest cause of ulcers is mountain climbing over molehills! A salesman calling on an important prospect may act as if it is a matter of life or death. A debutante facing her first ball may act as if she is going on trial for her life. Many people going to be interviewed about a job act as if they are “scared to death,” and so on. Perhaps this “life-or-death” feeling that many people experience in any sort of crisis situation is a heritage from our dim and distant past, when “failure” to primitive man usually was synonymous with “death.”
Remember, above all, that the key to any crisis situation is you. Practice and learn the simple techniques of this chapter, and you, like hundreds of others before you, can learn to make crises work for you by making each crisis a creative opportunity.
Your automatic Creative Mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend on its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than you ever could by conscious thought.
Remember what has been emphasized earlier: Our brain and nervous system cannot tell the difference between a real experience, and one that is vividly imagined. Our automatic Creative Mechanism always acts and reacts appropriately to the environment, circumstance, or situation. The only information concerning the environment, circumstance, or situation available to it is what you believe to be true concerning it.
In short, science confirms that there is a “tattooing,” or action pattern, of engrams in your brain for every successful action you have ever performed in the past. And if you can somehow furnish the spark to bring that action pattern into life, or “replay” it, it will execute itself, and all you’ll have to do is “swing the clubs” and “let nature take its course.”
But by arranging things so that we can succeed in little things, we can build an atmosphere of success that will carry over into larger undertakings. We can gradually undertake more difficult tasks and, after succeeding in them, be in a position to undertake something even more challenging. Success is literally built upon success, and there is much truth in the saying “Nothing succeeds like success.”
The idea of difficulty, threat, menace, arouses additional strength within us if we react to it aggressively rather than passively.
If we cannot drive out a negative feeling by making a frontal assault upon it, we can accomplish the same result by substituting a positive feeling.
Whenever we find ourselves experiencing undesirable feeling-tones, we should not concentrate on the undesirable feeling, even to the extent of driving it out. Instead, we should immediately concentrate on positive imagery—on filling the mind with wholesome, positive, desirable images, imaginations, and memories. If we do this, the negative feelings take care of themselves.
The past explains how you got here. But where you go from here is your responsibility.
After all, if our calendars put 15 months instead of 12 months into each year, you’d be celebrating a different year’s birthday this time around. That smaller number might very well convince your self-image of a different truth about your age, and you might very well feel and act differently.
Stem cell biology is the study of the regenerative and long-lived cells in our body. Almost every type of cell in the body can be re-created from stems cells, which are instrumental and absolutely necessary to make new healthy tissues in our body. The telomere is a structure located at the end of every healthy chromosome. This time-keeper of the individual cell shortens as we age. The shortening process can be linked to just about every disease identified with aging, such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, arthritis, and Alzheimer’s.
We do know this much: Mental attitudes can influence the body’s healing mechanisms. Placebos or sugar pills (capsules containing inert ingredients) have long been a medical mystery.
To write off placebos as “merely due to suggestions” explains nothing. More reasonable is the conclusion that in taking the “medicine” some sort of expectation of improvement is aroused, a goal-image of health is set up in the mind, and the Creative Mechanism works through the body’s own healing mechanism to accomplish the goal.
In the human body the capillaries are the channels through which waste is removed. It has definitely been established that lack of exercise and inactivity literally “dries up” the capillaries.
Have you ever wondered why so many actors and actresses manage to look far younger than their years, and present a youthful appearance at age 50 and beyond? Could it not be that these people have a need to look young, that they are interested in maintaining their appearance, and simply do not give up the goal of staying young, as most of us do when we reach the middle years?
“We age, not by years, but by events and our emotional reactions to them,”
Yet I cannot understand how a rational person can forgo medical help because he believes it inconsistent with his faith.
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.
Everything in life is a mental picture. Every goal you have begins as a picture in your mind. And anything you don’t like about yourself or your life can be changed by changing your mental pictures. Never forget: Even forgiveness is a mental picture.”