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March 20 - March 27, 2018
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.
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.” 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.” In imagination notice all the quiet, restful details. See yourself sitting down in your favorite chair, utterly relaxed and at peace with the world. Your room is secure. Nothing can touch you here. There is nothing to worry about. You left your worries at the foot of the stairs. There are no decisions to be made here—no hurry, no bother.
Our nervous system needs a certain amount of escapism. It needs some freedom and protection from the continual bombardment of external stimuli.
Your mental quiet room gives your nervous system a little vacation every day. For the moment, you mentally “vacate” your workaday world of duties, responsibilities, decisions, pressures, and “get away from it all” by mentally retiring into your “no-pressure chamber.”
Pictures are more impressive to your automatic mechanism than words.
Clear Your Mechanism Before Undertaking a New Problem
This exercise of retiring for a few moments into your quiet room in your mind can accomplish the same sort of “clearance” of your success mechanism, and for that reason, it is very helpful to practice it in between tasks, situations, and environments that require different moods, mental adjustments, or “mental sets.”
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.
As goal-striving beings we first must act. We set our own goal, determine our own course. Then—within the context of this goal-striving structure—we respond and react appropriately, that is, in a manner that will further our progress and serve our own ends.
If responding and reacting to negative feedback does not take us further down the road to our own goal—or serve our ends—then there is no need to respond at all. And if response of any kind gets us off course, or works against us—then no response is the appropriate response.
Doing Nothing Is the Proper Response to an Unreal Problem
As far as your emotions are concerned, the proper response to worry pictures is to totally ignore them. Live emotionally in the present moment. Analyze your environment—become more aware of what actually exists in your environment—and respond and react spontaneously to that.
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.
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 ...
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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
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A “crisis” is a situation that can either make you or break you. If you react properly to the situation, a “crisis” can give you strength, power, wisdom you do not ordinarily possess. If you react improperly, a crisis can rob you of the skill, control, and ability that you ordinarily have to call upon.
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.
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.
PRESSURE RETARDS LEARNING
The more intense the crisis situation under which you learn, the less you learn.
Over-motivation interferes with reasoning processes. The automatic reaction mechanism is jammed by too much conscious effort—trying too hard.
Practice without pressure and you will learn more efficiently and be able to perform better in a crisis situation.
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.
The results you get from sitting in a chair and visualizing are phenomenal.
The word “express” literally means to push out, to exert, to show forth. The word “inhibit” means to choke off, restrict. Self-expression is a pushing out—a showing forth—of the powers, talents, and abilities of the self. It means turning on your own light and letting it shine.
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. Then, when you face a crisis where an actual menace or inhibiting factor is present, you have learned to act calmly and correctly. There is a “carry-over” in your muscles, nerves, and brain from practice to the actual situation.
At the same time, your shadowboxing is building a mental image of yourself—acting correctly and successfully. The memory of this successful self-image also enables you to perform better.
“I always think about what I am going to do, and what I want to happen,” he said, “instead of what the batter is going to do, or what may happen to me.”
If we can maintain an aggressive attitude, react aggressively instead of negatively to threats and crises, the very situation itself can act as a stimulus to release untapped powers.
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.
KEEP YOUR GOAL IN MIND The essence of this aggressive attitude is remaining goal-oriented. You keep your own positive goal in mind.
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.”
DON’T MISTAKE EXCITEMENT FOR FEAR Many people have made the mistake of habitually interpreting the feeling of excitement as fear and anxiety, and therefore interpreting it as a proof of inadequacy.
Until you direct it toward a goal, this excitement is neither fear, anxiety, courage, confidence, nor anything else other than a stepped-up, reinforced supply of emotional steam in your boiler. It is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of additional strength to be used in any way you choose.
The excitement that you feel just before a crisis situation is an infusion of “spirit” and should be so interpreted by you.
It is not the excitement per se that makes the difference, but how it is used.
We use our imaginations against ourselves and make mountains out of molehills. Or else we do not use our imaginations at all to “see” what the situation really holds, but habitually and unthinkingly react as if every simple opportunity or threat were a life-or-death matter.
“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.
MOUNTAIN CLIMBING OVER MOLEHILLS Most of us, however, allow ourselves to be thrown off course by very minor or even imaginary threats, which we insist on interpreting as life-or-death or do-or-die situations.
Ask yourself, “What is the worst that can possibly happen if I fail?” rather than responding automatically, blindly and irrationally.
Close scrutiny will show that most of these everyday so-called crisis situations are not life-or-death matters at all, but opportunities to either advance, or stay where you are.
“I have everything to gain and nothing to lose.”
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. You supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the “means whereby.” If your muscles need to perform some motion to bring about the end result, your automatic mechanism will guide them much more accurately and delicately than you could by “taking thought.” If you need
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The possibility of the goal must be seen so clearly that it becomes “real” to your brain and nervous system. So real, in fact, that the same feelings are evoked as would be present if the goal were already achieved.
