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

by Maxwell Maltz

“Our future,” Jack said, “is controlled by a mental blueprint we have inside our subconscious mind, and it dictates where we think we belong.

you need to expand your self-image before you can have them. Trying to achieve without expanding your self-image doesn’t lead to lasting positive change.”

I felt like a failure because I was reliving my disappointments, my losses, my setbacks, my failures. Each day, when I felt badly about myself, it was as if I’d rubbed my face in the manure of bad memories instead of showering my face with clear-water memories of what I’d done well.

Even though I’d achieved something that almost all athletes who take up any sport will never achieve, I thought I was a failure because I didn’t win everything.

I was to enter this place that Dr. Maltz called the Theatre of the Mind. I’d close my eyes, then remember and relive my best moments—seeing them play out like a mental movie. My victories. My successes. My happiest times.

After reliving and reexperiencing myself at my best, I was able to flip a switch and use my imagination in the same way I used my memory. I could imagine and feel that I was achieving a goal in the future but experience it as if it was happening now, almost as if it was the memory of another accomplished goal.

You can be happy now as well as every single day you are working toward achieving your goals.

There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.”

the individual’s mental and spiritual concept or “picture” of himself, was the real key to personality and behavior.

Any breakthrough in science is likely to come from outside the system. “Experts” are the most thoroughly familiar with the developed knowledge inside the prescribed boundaries of a given science. Any new knowledge must usually come from the outside—not from “experts,” but from what someone has defined as an “inpert.”

Change the self-image and you change the personality and the behavior.

(“Positive thinking” does indeed “work” when it is consistent with the individual’s self-image. It literally cannot “work” when it is inconsistent with the self-image—until the self-image itself has been changed.)

The self-image is changed, for better or worse, not by intellect alone, or by intellectual knowledge alone, but by “experiencing.”

Wittingly or unwittingly you developed your self-image by your creative experiencing in the past. You can change it by the same method.

the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail.

Acquiring information itself is passive. Experiencing is active. When you “experience,” something happens inside your nervous system and your midbrain. New “engrams” and “neural” patterns are recorded in the gray matter of your brain.

it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.

Man is by nature a goal-striving being. And because man is “built that way,” he is not happy unless he is functioning as he was made to function—as a goal striver.

Understanding the psychology of the self can mean the difference between success and failure, love and hate, bitterness and happiness. The discovery of the real self can rescue a crumbling marriage, recreate a faltering career, and transform victims of “personality failure.” On another plane, discovering your real self means the difference between freedom and the compulsions of conformity.

All your actions, feelings, behaviors—even your abilities—are always consistent with this self-image.

The self-image is a premise, a base, or a foundation upon which your entire personality, your behavior, and even your circumstances are built. Because of this our experiences seem to verify, and thereby strengthen, our self-images and a vicious or a beneficent cycle, as the case may be, is set up.

The self-image can be changed.

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 secret is this: To really “live,” that is, to find life reasonably satisfying, you must have an adequate and realistic self-image that you can live with.

You must find your self acceptable to “you.” You must have a wholesome self-esteem. You must have a self that you can trust and believe in.

You must have a self that you are not ashamed to “be,” and one that you can feel free to express creatively...

When this self-image is intact and secure, you feel good. When it is threatened, you feel anxious and insecure. When your self-image is adequate and one that you can be wholesomely proud of, you feel self-confident. You feel free to “be yourself” and to express yourself.

This Creative Mechanism within you is impersonal. It will work automatically and impersonally to achieve goals of success and happiness, or unhappiness and failure, depending on the goals that you yourself set for it.

The goals that our own Creative Mechanism seeks to achieve are mental images, or mental pictures, which we create by the use of imagination.

Our self-image prescribes the limits for the accomplishment of any particular goals. It prescribes the “area of the possible.”

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.

allow yourself to believe that even a seemingly small victory (learning to tie your shoe or write your name for the first time) is all you need to reverse the course of negativity in your life.

A “scanner” in your brain scans back through your stored memories until the correct name is “recognized.”

man has access to knowledge, facts, and ideas other than his own individual memory or stored information from learning or experience.

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.

Every human being has been literally “engineered for success” by his Creator. Every human being has access to a power greater than himself.

If you were engineered for success and happiness, then the old picture of yourself as unworthy of happiness, a person who was “meant” to fail, must be in error.

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.

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.

All servo-mechanisms achieve a goal by negative feedback, or by going forward, making mistakes, and immediately correcting course.

4. Skill learning of any kind is accomplished by trial and error, mentally correcting aim after an error, until a “successful” motion, movement, or performance has been achieved. After that, 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 ef...

This trust is necessary because your Creative Mechanism operates below the level of consciousness, and you cannot “know” wh...

We either use our imaginations constructively or destructively. The key is becoming aware of which way you’re using yours—and improving on it daily.

A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment.

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information that you give to it from your forebrain. Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you think or imagine to be true.

You act, and feel, not according to what things are really like, but according to the image your mind holds of what they are like. You have certain mental images of yourself, your world, and the people around you, and you behave as though these images were the truth, the reality, rather than the things they represent.

If we picture ourselves performing in a certain manner, it is nearly the same as the actual performance. Mental practice helps to make perfect.

Bluff may open the door to a job you know nothing about but in nine cases out of ten it won’t keep you from being fired when your inexperience becomes evident. There’s only one way I know to project your practical knowledge beyond your present occupation and that is rehearsal planning.”