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

by Maxwell Maltz

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.

It is our own responses that we have to be concerned about—not other people’s. We can tighten up, become angry, anxious, or resentful, and “feel hurt.” Or, we can make no response, remain relaxed, and feel no hurt. 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. We have to “do something” to feel fear, anger, anxiety. “No man is hurt but by himself,”

One of the biggest mistakes we can make is to confuse our behavior with our “self” . . . to conclude that because we did a certain act it characterizes us as a certain sort of person.

So remember you make mistakes. Mistakes don’t make you—anything.

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.

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.”

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.

He decided it was because when he was eating with Ma and Pa, he did not think or bother to wonder how he was acting. He was neither careful nor self-critical. He was not concerned about producing an effect. He felt composed, relaxed, and did all right. Mangan cured his self-consciousness by remembering how he had felt, and how he had acted, when he “was eating in the kitchen with Ma and Pa.” Then, when he walked into a high-class dining room, he would imagine or pretend that he “was going to eat with Ma and Pa”—and act that way.

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.

if your basic beliefs are themselves wrong, untrue, unrealistic, or non-sensible, these get your compass off true north, just as magnetic bits of metal can disturb the compass of the mariner, and guide him into trouble rather than away from it.

the yardstick for judging emotions is not “goodness” or “badness,” as such, but appropriateness and inappropriateness.

Properly directed and controlled, anger is an important element of courage.

If every time a child comes up with an opinion, he is squelched and put in his place, he learns that it is “right” for him to be a nobody, and wrong to want to be a somebody.

If you are among the millions who suffer unhappiness and failure because of inhibition—you need to deliberately practice disinhibition. You need to practice being less careful, less concerned, less conscientious. You need to practice speaking before you think instead of thinking before you speak—acting without thinking, instead of thinking or “considering carefully” before you act.

The world does need a certain amount of inhibition. But not you. The key words are ‘a certain amount.’ You have such an excessive amount of inhibition, you are like a patient running a temperature of 108 degrees, who says, ‘But surely body heat is necessary for health. Man is a warm-blooded animal and could not live without a certain amount of temperature—we all need temperature—yet you are telling me that I should concentrate completely and entirely on reducing my temperature, and ignore completely the danger of not having any temperature.’”

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,”

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.

we need to do is to find this quiet center within us and retreat into it periodically for rest, recuperation, and renewed vigor.

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.

Whenever you have a few spare moments during the day between appointments or while riding the bus, retire into your quiet room. Whenever you begin to feel tension mounting, or to feel hurried or harried, retire into your quiet room for a few moments. 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.”

Many people carry their troubles to bed with them when they should be resting. Mentally and emotionally, they are still trying to do something about a situation, at a time when “doing” is not in order.

But the really helpful thing to know about all this is that friendliness, love, peace, quiet, and calmness also “carry over.” It is impossible, as we have said, to experience or feel fear, anger, or anxiety while completely relaxed, quiet, and composed. Retiring into your “quiet room” thus becomes an ideal clearance mechanism for emotions and moods. Old emotions evaporate and disappear. At the same time you experience calmness, peacefulness, and a feeling of well-being, which will also “carry over” into whatever activities immediately follow. Your quiet time wipes the slate clean so to speak, clears the machine, and gives you a clean new page for the environment that is to follow.

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 activit...

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 t...

Stop scaring yourself to death with your own mental pictures. Stop fighting straw men. Emotionally, respond only to what actually ...

You also have a built-in spiritual thermostat that enables you to maintain an emotional climate and atmosphere in spite of the emotional weather around you.

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.