Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded (The Psycho-Cybernetics Series)

by Maxwell Maltz

as soon as the error has been recognized as such, and correction of course made, it is equally important that the error be consciously forgotten, and the successful attempt remembered and dwelt on. These memories of past failures do no harm as long as our conscious thought and attention are focused on the positive goal to be accomplished.

Our errors, mistakes, failures, and sometimes even our humiliations, were necessary steps in the learning process. However, they were meant to be means to an end—and not an end in themselves. When they have served their purpose, they should be forgotten.

If we consciously dwell on the error, or consciously feel guilty about the error and keep berating ourselves because of it, then—unwittingly—the error or failure itself becomes the “goal” that is consciously held in imagination and memory. The unhappiest of mortals is that man who insists on reliving the past, over and over in imagination—cont...

Continually criticizing yourself for past mistakes and errors does not help matters, but on the other hand tends to perpetuate the very behavior you would change. Memories of past failures can adversely affect present performance, if we dwell on them and foolishly conclude, “I failed yesterday; therefore, it follows that I will fail again today.” However, this does not prove that unconscious reaction patterns have any power in themselves to repeat and perpetuate themselves, or that all buried memories of failure must be eradicated before behavior can be changed. If we are victimized, it is by our conscious, thinking mind and not by the “unconscious.” For it is with the thinking part of our personality that we draw conclusions, and select the “goal images” that we shall concentrate upon. The minute that we change our minds and stop giving power to the past, the past with its mistakes loses its power over us.

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?”

Lecky found that there were two powerful “levers” for changing beliefs and concepts. There are “standard” convictions which are strongly held by nearly everyone. These are (1) the feeling or belief that one is capable of doing his share, holding up his end of the log, exerting a certain amount of independence, and (2) the belief that there is “something” inside you which should not be allowed to suffer indignities.

Trace down the belief about yourself, or the belief about the world, or other people, which is behind your negative behavior. Does “something always happen” to cause you to miss out just when success seems within your grasp? Perhaps you secretly feel “unworthy” of success, or that you do not deserve it. Are you ill at ease around other people? Perhaps you believe you are inferior to them, or that other people per se are hostile and unfriendly. Do you become anxious and fearful for no good reason in a situation that is relatively safe? Perhaps you believe that the world you live in is a hostile, unfriendly, dangerous place, or that you “deserve punishment.” 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?

Clarence Darrow, the famous attorney, said his success started the day that he “got mad” when he attempted to secure a mortgage to buy a house. Just as the transaction was about to be completed, the lender’s wife spoke up and said, “Don’t be a fool. He will never make enough money to pay it off.” Darrow himself had had serious doubts about the same thing. But something happened when he heard her remark. He became indignant, both at the woman and at himself, and determined he would be a success.

Rational thought, to be effective in changing belief and behavior, must be accompanied with deep feeling and 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. If you will analyze this, you will see that you are using a process you have often used before—worry! The only difference is you change your goals from negative to positive. When you worry, you first of all picture some undesirable future outcome, or goal, very vividly in your imagination. You use no effort or willpower. But you keep dwelling on the “end result.” You keep thinking about it—dwelling on it—picturing it to yourself as a “possibility.” You play with the idea that it “might happen.” This constant repetition, and thinking in terms of “possibilities,” makes the end result appear more and more “real” to you. After time, appropriate emotions are automatically generated—fear, anxiety, discouragement—all these are appropriate to the undesirable end result you are worrying about. Now change the “goal picture”—and you can as easily generate “good emotions.” Constantly picturing to yourself, and dwelling on, a desirable end result will also make the possibi...

If our conscious mind is working and on the job, we do not have to accept them blindly. “It ain’t necessarily so” is a good motto.

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.

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. To spend time and effort concentrating on what you do not want is not rational.

It is the job of your conscious mind to pay strict attention to the task at hand, to what you are doing and what is going on around you so that these incoming sensory messages can keep your automatic mechanism currently advised of the environment and allow it to respond spontaneously. In baseball parlance you must “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. The automatic mechanism is unconscious. We cannot see the wheels turning. We cannot know what is taking place beneath the surface. And because it works spontaneously in reacting to present and current needs, we can have no intimation or certified guarantee in advance that it will come up with the answer. We are forced into a position of trust. And only by trusting and acting do we receive signs and wonders. 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.

Our trouble is that we ignore the automatic Creative Mechanism and try to do everything and solve all our problems by conscious thought, or “forebrain thinking.” The forebrain is comparable to the “operator” of a computer, or any other type of servo-mechanism. It is with the forebrain that we think “I,” and feel our sense of identity. It is with the forebrain that we exercise imagination, or set goals. We use the forebrain to gather information, make observations, and evaluate incoming sense-data, form judgments. But the forebrain cannot create. It cannot “do” the job to be done, any more than the operator of a computer can “do” the work. It is the job of the forebrain to pose problems and to identify them—but by its very nature it was never engineered to solve problems.

Because modern man does depend almost entirely on his forebrain, he becomes too careful, too anxious, and too fearful of “results,” and the advice of Jesus to “take no thought for the morrow,” or of St. Paul to be “careful in nothing,” is regarded as impractical nonsense.

If we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic preoccupation about their results. Such a habit, like other habits, can be formed. 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.

persons who had tried unsuccessfully for years to rid themselves of anxieties, worries, inferiorities, guilt feelings, by making conscious efforts, only to find that success finally came when they gave up the struggle consciously, and stopped trying to solve their problems by conscious thought. “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.”

fact that what we have been saying is true can be seen in the experience of writers, inventors, and other creative workers. Invariably, they tell us that creative ideas are not consciously thought out by forebrain thinking, but come automatically, spontaneously, and somewhat like a bolt out of the blue, when the conscious mind has let go of the problem and is engaged in thinking of something else.

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.

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.

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.

the future I would do all my worrying, all my forebrain thinking, before a decision was made, and that after making a decision, and setting the wheels in motion, I would “dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.” Believe it or not, it works. I not only feel better, sleep better, and work better, but my business is running much smoother. I also discovered that the same principle works in a hundred different little personal ways. For example, I used to worry and fume about having to go to the dentist, and other unpleasant tasks. Then I said to myself, “This is silly. You know the unpleasantness involved before you make the decision to go. If the unpleasantness is all that important to cause so much concern, and not worth the worry involved, you can simply decide not to go. But, if the decision is that the trip is worth a little unpleasantness, and a definite decision is made to go—then forget about it. Consider the risk before the wheel starts turning.”

I used to worry the night before I had to make a speech at a board meeting. Then I said to myself, “I’m either going to make the speech or I’m not. If the decision is to make it, then there’s no need in considering not making it—or trying to mentally run away from it.” I have discovered that much nervousness and anxiety is caused by mentally trying to escape or run away from something that you have decided to go through with physically. If the decision is made to go through with it—not to run away physically—why mentally keep considering or hoping for escape? I used to detest social gatherings and go along only to please my wife, or for business reasons. I went, but mentally I resisted it, and was usually pretty grumpy and uncommunicative. Then I decided that if the decision was to go along physically, I might as well go along mentally—and dismiss all thoughts of resistance. Last night I not only went to what I would formerly have called a stupid social gathering, but I was surprised to find myself thoroughly enjoying it.

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.

the sole secret of his happiness and success in life. Live life in “day-tight compartments,” he advised his students. Look neither forward nor backward beyond a 24-hour cycle. Live today as best you can. By living today well you do the most within your power to make tomorrow better.

Alcoholics Anonymous uses the same principle when they say, “Don’t try to stop drinking forever—merely say, ‘I will not drink today.’”

The next time you feel yourself tensing up, becoming jittery and nervous—pull yourself up short and say, “What is there here and now that I should respond to? That I can do something about?” A great deal of nervousness is caused from unwittingly “trying” to do something that cannot be done here or now. You are then geared for action or for “doing,” which cannot take place.

Try to Do Only One Thing at a Time Another cause of confusion, and the resulting feelings of nervousness, hurry, and anxiety, is the absurd habit of trying to do many things at one time. The student studies and watches TV simultaneously. 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.

You can have many goals, but concentrating on just one at a time will help you accomplish far more than attempting to focus on many at once. Get the fire of desire started within being single-minded about one goal and the flame will naturally spread to the others without you forcing it.

Sleep on It 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.”

A. Schindler defines happiness as “a state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant a good share of the time.”

“Be kind and loving to other people and you will be happy.” It might be nearer the truth if we said, “Be happy—and you will be good, more successful, healthier, feel and act more charitably toward others.”

Happiness is simply “a state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant a good share of the time.”

Happiness Does Not Lie in the Future but in the Present “We are never living, but only hoping to live; and, looking forward always to being happy, it is inevitable that we never are so,”

I have found that one of the commonest causes of unhappiness among my patients is that they are attempting to live their lives on the deferred payment plan. They do not live, or enjoy life now, but wait for some future event or occurrence. They will be happy when they get married, when they get a better job, when they get the house paid for, when they get the children through college, when they have completed some task or won some victory. Invariably, they are disappointed. Happiness is a mental habit, a mental attitude, and if it is not learned and practiced in the present it is never experienced. It cannot be made contingent upon solving some external problem. When one problem is solved, another appears to take its place. Life is a series of problems. If you are to be happy at all, you must be happy—period! Not happy “because of.”

Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

No one, other than a saint, can be 100 percent happy all the time. And, as George Bernard Shaw quipped, we would probably be miserable if we were.

To a large extent we react to petty annoyances, frustrations, and the like with grumpiness, dissatisfaction, resentment, and irritability, purely out of habit. We have practiced reacting that way so long, it has become habitual. Much of this habitual unhappiness-reaction originated because of some event that we interpreted as a blow to our self-esteem. A driver honks his horn at us unnecessarily; someone interrupts and doesn’t pay attention while we’re talking; someone doesn’t come through for us as we think he should. Even impersonal events can be interpreted, and reacted to, as affronts to our self-esteem. The bus we wanted to catch had to be late; it had to go and rain when we had planned to play golf; traffic had to get into a snarl just when we needed to catch the plane. We react with anger, resentment, self-pity, or in other words, unhappiness.

Even in regard to tragic conditions, and the most adverse environment, we can usually manage to be happier, if not completely happy, by not adding to the misfortune our own feelings of self-pity, resentment, and our own adverse opinions. “How can I be happy?” the wife of an alcoholic husband asked me. “I don’t know,” I said, “but you can be happier by resolving not to add resentment and self-pity to your misfortune.” “How can I possibly be happy?” asked a businessman, “I have just lost $200,000 on the stock market. I am ruined and disgraced.” “You can be happier,” I said, “by not adding your own opinion to the facts. It is a fact that you lost $200,000. It is your opinion that you are ruined and disgraced.” 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.”

When I announced that I wanted to be a doctor, I was told that this could not be, because my folks had no money. It was a fact that my mother had no money. It was only an opinion that I could never be a doctor. Later, I was told I could never take postgraduate courses in Germany, and that it was impossible for a young plastic surgeon to hang out his own shingle and go into business for himself in New York. I did all these things—and one of the things that helped me was that I kept reminding myself that all these impossibles were opinions, not facts. I not only managed to reach my goals—but I was happy in the process—even when I had to pawn my overcoat to buy medical books, and do without lunch in order to purchase cadavers.

These were facts. But I kept reminding myself that it was merely my opinion that this was a “catastrophe” and that life was not worth living. I not only got over it, but it turned out it was ...

when man is functioning as a goal-striver, he tends to feel fairly happy, regardless of circumstances.

Edison lost a laboratory worth millions in a fire with no insurance. “What in the world will you do?” someone asked. “We will start rebuilding tomorrow morning,” said Edison. He maintained an aggressive attitude; he was still goal-oriented despite his misfortune. And because he did maintain an aggressive goal-striving attitude, it is a good bet that he was never very unhappy about his loss.

I related all this to the young business executive and suggested that the real cause of his unhappy feeling was not that he had lost $200,000, but that he had lost his goal; he had lost his aggressive attitude, and was yielding passively rather than reacting aggressively. “I must have been crazy,” he told me later, “to let you convince me that losing the money was not what was making me unhappy—but I’m awfully glad that you did.” He stopped moaning about his misfortune, “faced about,” got himself another goal—and started working toward it. Within five years he not only had more money than ever before in his life, but for the first time he was in a business that he enjoyed.

Form the habit of reacting aggressively and positively toward threats and problems. Form the habit of keeping goal-oriented all the time, regardless of what happens. Do this by practicing a positive aggressive attitude, both in actual everyday situations that come up, and also in your imagination. See yourself in your imagination taking positive, intelligent action toward solving a problem or reaching a goal. See yourself reacting to threats, not by running away or evading them, but by meeting them, dealing with them, grappling with them in an aggressive and intelligent manner.

The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

The idea that happiness, or keeping one’s thoughts pleasant most of the time, can be deliberately and systematically cultivated by practicing in a more or less cold-blooded manner, strikes many of my patients as rather incredible, if not ludicrous, when I first suggest it. Yet experience has shown not only that this can be done, but that it is about the only way that the “habit of happiness” can be cultivated. In the first place happiness isn’t something that happens to you. It is something you yourself do and determine upon. If you wait for happiness to catch up with you, or “just happen,” or be brought to you by others, you are likely to have a long wait.

No one can decide what your thoughts shall be but yourself. If you wait until circumstances “justify” your thinking pleasant thoughts, you are also likely to wait forever. Every day is a mixture of good and evil—no day or circumstance is completely 100 percent “good.” There are elements and “facts” present in the world, and in our personal lives at all times, that “justify” either a pessimistic and grumpy outlook, or an optimistic and happy outlook, depending on our choice. It is largely a matter of selection, attention, and decision. Nor is it a matter of being either intellectually ho...

I simply had to close the doors of my mind to destructive thoughts—and