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When this self-image is intact and secure, you feel “good.” When it is threatened, you feel anxious and insecure. When it 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. You function at your optimum. When it is an object of shame, you attempt to hide it rather than express it.
peace of mind, or whatever your own conception of supreme good may be, is experienced
“The faculty of imagination is the great spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement . . . Destroy this faculty, and the condition of man will become as stationary as that of the brutes,” said Dugold Stewart, the famous Scottish philosopher. “You can imagine your future,” says Henry J. Kaiser, who attributes much of his success in business to the constructive, positive use of creative imagination.
Your built-in servo-mechanism functions both as a “guidance system” to automatically steer you in the right direction to achieve certain goals, or make correct responses to environment, and also as an “electronic brain” which can function automatically to solve problems, give you needed answers, and provide new ideas or “inspirations.”
If we picture ourselves performing in a certain manner, it is nearly the same as the actual performance. Mental practice helps to make perfect.
This same creative mechanism within you can help you achieve your best possible “self” if you will form a picture in your imagination of the self you wanted to be and “see yourself” in the new role. This is a necessary condition to personality transformation, regardless of the method of therapy used. Somehow, before a person can change, he must “see” himself in a new role.
Emile Coué, the little French pharmacist who astonished the world around 1920 with the results he obtained with “the power of suggestion,” insisted that effort was the one big reason most people failed to utilize their inner powers. “Your suggestions (ideal goals) must be made without effort if they are to be effective,” he said. Another famous Coué saying was his “Law of Reversed Effort”: “When the will and the imagination are in conflict, the imagination invariably wins the day.”
Making an effort to refrain from the habit, actually reinforced the habit, he found. His experiments proved that the best way to break a habit is to form a clear mental image of the desired end result, and to practice without effort toward reaching that goal.
Physical relaxation, when practiced daily, brings about an accompanying “mental relaxation,” and a “relaxed attitude” which enables us to better consciously control our automatic mechanism. Physical relaxation also, in itself, has a powerful influence in “dehypnotizing” us from negative attitudes and reaction patterns.
If we consciously dwell upon the error, or consciously feel guilty about the error, and keep berating ourselves because of it, then—unwittingly—the error or failure itself becomes the “goal” which is consciously held in imagination and memory.
Remember Athens Utilities! The more I believed that my memory was hurting my ability to work efficiently, the more I would beat myself up! Inevitably, the more others would make fun of me and my efficiency plumeted!
When President Eisenhower was General Eisenhower in World War II he was asked what would have been the effect upon the allied cause, if the invasion troops had been thrown back into the sea from the beaches
of Italy. “It would have been very bad,” he said, “but I never allow my mind to think in that way.”
We could relieve ourselves of a vast load of care, anxiety and worry, if we could but recognize the simple truth, that our Creator made ample provisions for us to live successfully in this or any other age by providing us with a built-in creative mechanism.
“Ideas, I find, come most readily when you are doing something that keeps the mind alert without putting too much strain upon it. Shaving, driving a car, sawing a plank, or fishing or hunting, for instance. Or engaging with some friend in stimulating conversation. Some of my best ideas came from information picked up casually and entirely unrelated to my work.”
Your creative mechanism cannot function or work tomorrow. It can only function in the present—today.
The next time you feel yourself tensing up, becoming jittery and nervous—pull yourself up short and say, “What is there here and now that I should respond to? that I can do something about?” A great deal of nervousness is caused from unwittingly “trying” to do something that cannot be done here or now. You are geared for action or for “doing” which cannot take place.
When we feel jittery, or worried, or anxious in thinking of the great amount of work that lies before us, the jittery feelings are not caused by the work, but by our mental attitude—which is “I ought to be able to do this all at once.” We become nervous because we are trying to do the impossible, and thereby making futility and frustration inevitable. The truth is: We can only “do” one thing at a time. Realizing this, fully convincing ourselves of this simple and obvious truth, enables us to mentally stop trying to “do” the things that lie “next,” and to concentrate all our awareness, all our
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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.”
To a large extent we react to petty annoyances, frustrations, and the like with grumpiness, dissatisfaction, resentment and irritability, purely out of habit. We have practiced reacting that way so long, it has become habitual. Much of this habitual unhappiness-reaction originated because of some event which we interpreted as a blow to our self-esteem.
“How can I be happy?” the wife of an alcoholic husband asked me. “I don’t know,” I said, “but you can be happier by resolving not to add resentment and self-pity to your misfortune.”
“How can I possibly be happy?” asked a businessman. “I have just lost $200,000 on the stock market. I am ruined and disgraced.” “You can be happier,” I said, “by not adding your own opinion to the facts. It is a fact that you lost $200,000. It is your opinion that you are ruined and disgraced.”
“Men are disturbed,” said the sage, “not by things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen.”
since man is a goal-striving being, he is functioning naturally and normally when he is oriented toward some positive goal and striving toward some desirable goal.
