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

by Maxwell Maltz

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

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.

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.

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.”

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. They are allowed to dictate how he shall feel, how he shall act. He is wholly dependent on other people, just as a beggar is. He makes unreasonable demands and claims on other people.