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

by Maxwell Maltz

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:

“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.”

We are engineered as goal-seeking mechanisms. We are built that way. When we have no personal goal that we are interested in and that “means something” to us, we are apt to “go around in circles,” feel “lost,” and find life itself “aimless” and “purposeless.” We are built to conquer environment, solve problems, achieve goals, and we find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve.

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.

Ask yourself, “How does this appear—to him?”

Oftentimes, we color incoming sensory data by our own fears, anxieties, or desires. But to deal effectively with environment, we must be willing to acknowledge the truth about it. Only when we understand what it is can we respond appropriately. We must be able to see the truth, and to accept the truth, good or bad.

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.”

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.

All problems, personal, national, or combat, become smaller if you don’t dodge them, but confront them.

Nothing in this world is ever absolutely certain or guaranteed. Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk—and to act.

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.”

Be willing to make a few mistakes, to suffer a little pain to get what you want. Don’t sell yourself short. “Most people,” said General R. E. Chambers, chief of the Army’s Psychiatry and Neurology Consultant Division, “don’t know how brave they really are. In fact, many potential heroes, both men and women, live out their lives in self-doubt. If they only knew they had these deep resources, it would help give them the self-reliance to meet most problems, even a big crisis.” You’ve got the resources. But you never know you’ve got them until you act—and give them a chance to work for you.

Successful personalities have some interest in and regard for other people. They have a respect for others’ problems and needs. They respect the dignity of human personality and deal with other people as if they were human beings, rather than as pawns in their own game. They recognize that every person is a child of God and is a unique individual who deserves some dignity and respect. It is a psychological fact that our feelings about ourselves tend to correspond to our feelings about other people. When a person begins to feel more compassion about others, he invariably begins to feel more compassion toward himself.

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

To engage our Success Mechanisms, repeat the commands that work and remember them. Forget the mistakes and errors.

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. We condemn ourselves. We flay ourselves with shame and remorse (both are highly egotistical, self-centered emotions). And self-confidence disappears.

It doesn’t matter how many times you have failed in the past. What matters is the successful attempt, which should be remembered, reinforced, and dwelt upon.

any young man who wants to be a scientist must be willing to fail 99 times before he succeeds once, and suff...

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 ...

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.

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. It is important that we learn to accept this actual self, with all its imperfections, because it is the only vehicle we have.

“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.”

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.

“That is not to feel that you have to pinpoint the ball right to the cup itself on a long putt, but to aim at an area the size of a washtub. This takes off the strain, relaxes you, enables you to perform better. If it’s good enough for the professionals, it should be good enough for you.”

Many children continue to get their way, and have their problems solved by overindulgent parents, by merely expressing their feelings of frustration. All they have to do is feel frustrated and dissatisfied and the problem is solved. This way of life “works” for the infant and for some small children. It does not work in adult life.

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.”

When you are blocked in achieving some important goal, you are somewhat like a steam locomotive with a full head of steam with nowhere to go. 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.

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.

A great deal of insecurity is not due to the fact that our inner resources are actually inadequate, but due to the fact that we use a false measuring stick. We compare our actual abilities to an imagined “ideal,” perfect, or absolute self. Thinking of yourself in terms of absolutes induces insecurity.

Since man is a goal-striving mechanism, the self realizes itself fully only when man is moving forward toward something.

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.

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.”

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. As we get to know the other fellow, we feel less need for pretense. We “unthaw” and become more natural. The more we do this the more we feel we can afford to dispense with the sham and pretense and feel more comfortable just being ourselves.

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. It is an old psychological axiom that constant exposure to the object of fear immunizes against the fear. As the lonely person continues to force himself into social relations with other human beings—not in a passive way, but as an active contributor—he will gradually find that most people are friendly, and that he is accepted. His shyness and timidity begin to disappear. He feels more comfortable in the presence of other people and with himself. The experience of their acceptance of him enables him to accept himself.

The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of making one.

Realize that it is not required that a man be 100 percent right at all times. No baseball batter has ever had a 1000 average. If he is right three times out of ten he is considered good.

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.

Use self-esteem for yourself, instead of against yourself, by convincing yourself of this truth: Big men and big personalities make mistakes and admit them. It is the little man who is afraid to admit he has been wrong.

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success; we often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

As long as you harbor resentment, it is literally impossible for you to picture yourself as a self-reliant, independent, self-determining person who is “the captain of his soul, the master of his fate.” The resentful person turns over his reins to other people.

Many people acquire the outward symbols of success, but when they go to open the long-sought-for treasure chest, they find it empty. It is as if the money they have strained so hard to attain turns to counterfeit in their hands. Along the way, they lost the capacity to enjoy. And when you have lost the capacity to enjoy, no amount of wealth or anything else can bring success or happiness.

A person who has the capacity to enjoy still alive within him finds enjoyment in many ordinary and simple things in life. He also enjoys whatever success in a material way he has achieved.

Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively. You either have no goal that is important enough to you, or you are not using your talents and efforts in striving toward an important goal. It is the person who has no purpose of his own who pessimistically concludes, “Life has no purpose.”

the driver of the automobile does not look at the control panel exclusively and continuously. To do so might be disastrous. He must focus his gaze through the windshield, look where he is going, and keep his primary attention on his goal—where he wants to go. He merely glances at the negative indicators from time to time. When he does, he does not fix upon them or dwell upon them. He quickly focuses his sight ahead of him again and concentrates on the positive goal of where he wants to go.

The emotional wall that we build as protection against one person cuts us off from all other human beings, and from our real selves. As we have pointed out previously, the person who feels “lonely,” or out of touch with other human beings, also feels out of touch with his real self and with life.

Emotional scars prevent you from creative living, or being what Dr. Arthur W. Combs called a “self-fulfilled person.” Dr. Combs, professor of educational psychology and counseling at the University of Florida, said that the goal of every human being should be to become a “self-fulfilled person.” This, he said, is not something you’re born with, but must be achieved. 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.

A big, strong man does not feel threatened by a small danger; a little man does. In the same way, a healthy strong ego, with plenty of self-esteem, does not feel itself threatened by every innocent remark.

Self-esteem is as necessary to the spirit as food is to the body. The cure for self-centeredness, self-concern, egotism, and all the ills that go with it, is the development of a healthy, strong ego by building up self-esteem. When a person has adequate self-esteem, little slights offer no threat at all—they are simply “passed over” and ignored. Even deeper emotional wounds are likely to heal faster and cleaner, with no festering sores to poison life and spoil happiness.

His emphasis is as much (or more) on the giving as on the getting. He doesn’t expect love to be handed to him on a silver platter. Nor does he have a compulsive need that “everybody” must love him and approve of him. He has sufficient ego-security to tolerate the fact that a certain number of people will dislike him and disapprove. He feels some sense of responsibility for his life and conceives of himself primarily as one who acts, determines, gives, goes after what he wants, rather than as a person who is the passive recipient of all the good things in life.