Your Erroneous Zones

by Wayne W. Dyer

YOU ARE THE SUM TOTAL OF YOUR CHOICES, and I am just “far out” enough to believe that with an appropriate amount of motivation and effort you can be anything you choose.

With death so endless a proposition and life so breathtakingly brief, ask yourself, “Should I avoid doing the things I really want to do?” “Should I live my life as others want me to?” “Are things important to accumulate?” “Is putting it off the way to live?” Chances are your answers can be summed up in a few words: Live…Be You…Enjoy…Love.

ask yourself an important question, “How long am I going to be dead?”

Surely if your sojourn on earth is so brief, it ought at least to be pleasing to you. In a word, it’s your life; do with it what you want.

They know how to choose happiness over depression, because they know how to deal with the problems of their lives. Notice I didn’t say solve the problems. Rather than measuring their intelligence on their ability to solve the problem, they measure it on their capacity for maintaining themselves as happy and worthy, whether the problem gets solved or not.

Those who recognize problems as a human condition and don’t measure happiness by an absence of problems are the most intelligent kind of humans we know;

Cal makes himself unhappy by convincing himself that what someone else thinks is more important than what he thinks.

Perhaps you’re skeptical. You may say something like, “I can think all I want, but I still get unhappy when he starts to drill.” Think back to the stick shift. When did you believe that you could drive it? A thought becomes a belief when you’ve worked on it repeatedly, not when you simply try it once and use your initial inability as the rationale for giving up.

Using your mind actively means assessing the people and events which give you the greatest difficulty and then deciding on new mental efforts to make them work for you.

If the angry voice is simply a device for emphasis and it works, then you’ve adopted a healthy strategy. However, if you yell at others not to make a point, but because you are internally upset, then you’ve immobilized yourself,

there are people to define it. Try this one on for size. The ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves, without any insistence that they satisfy you.

Thus if you choose to use cosmetic aids of any kind, it will not be based on disliking what you are covering up, but for reasons of novelty or personal fulfillment.

Acceptance means no complaining, and happiness means no complaining about the things over which you can do nothing. Complaining is the refuge of those who have no self-reliance.

There are two occasions when complaining is least appreciated in the world: (1) Whenever you tell someone else that you are tired. (2) Whenever you tell someone else that you don’t feel well. If you are tired, you can exercise several options, but complaining to even one poor soul, let alone a loved one, is abusing that person. And it won’t make you less tired. The same kind of logic applies to your “not feeling well.”

Boastful behavior is motivated by others, by an attempt to gain their favor. It means the individual is evaluating himself on the basis of how others see him. If he were not, he would not feel the need to convince them. Self-love means you love yourself; it doesn’t demand the love of others. There is no need to convince others.

Needing approval is tantamount to saying, “Your view of me is more important than my own opinion of myself.”

It is impossible to go through life without incurring a great deal of disapproval. It is the way of humanity, the dues you pay for your “aliveness,” something that simply cannot be avoided.

The need for approval is based on a single assumption. “Don’t trust yourself—check it out with someone else first.”

Any student who begins to show signs of self-actualization and personal mastery is quickly put in his place. Students who are independent, full of self-love, not susceptible to guilt and worry, are systematically labeled troublemakers.

Thus, a man behaves morally not because he believes it to be appropriate for him, but because God wants him to behave that way.

…If I were to read, much less to answer all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out alright, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.*

Work at eliminating the numerous apologies that you make even when you aren’t really sorry for what you’ve just said. All apologies are pleas for forgiveness, and requests for forgiveness are approval-seeking which takes the form of, “I know you wouldn’t like me if I really meant what I just did, so please say that I’m still okay.” Apologizing is a waste of time. If you need someone else to forgive you before you can feel better, then you are giving them control over your feelings. While you can resolve not to behave in certain ways again, and see some of your behavior as unfortunate, apologizing behavior is a sickness that invests control of one’s feelings in another.

Chronicle how many declarative versus interrogative sentences you make. Do you ask questions, seek permission and approval, as opposed to making a statement? For example, the question, “Nice day, isn’t it?” puts the other person into the problem-solving role, and you into the approval-seeking position. A simple, “Nice day” is a declaration, rather than an attempt to seek an answer. If you are always asking questions of others you are into approval-seeking in what may seem a petty area, but which is reflective of your lack of confidence in your own ability to take charge.

Sören Kierkegaard wrote, “Once you label me, you negate me.”

Were he to believe in the present moment and his ability to make a choice, his sentence would change from, “I’m shy,” to “Up until now, I’ve behaved in a shy manner.”

Throughout life, the two most futile emotions are guilt for what has been done and worry about what might be done.

Deliberately choose to act in some manner that is in direct conflict with your usual areas of worry. If you compulsively save for the future, always worried about having enough money for another day, begin to use your money today. Be like the rich uncle who put in his will, “Being of sound mind, I spent all my money while I was alive.”

The word security as used here refers to external guarantees, possessions such as money, a house and a car, to bulwarks such as a job or a position in the community. But there is a different kind of security that is worth pursuing, and this is the internal security of trusting yourself to handle anything that may come down the pike. This is the only lasting security, the only real security. Things can break down, a depression can wipe out your money, your house can be repossessed, but you, you can be a rock of self-esteem. You can believe so much in you and your internal strength that things or others will be seen as mere pleasant but superfluous adjuncts to your life.

Try this little exercise. Suppose that right now, this second, as you are reading this book, someone swooped down on you, stripped you naked, and carted you off in a helicopter. No warning, no money, nothing but yourself. Supposing you were flown to the middle of Red China and dropped in a field. You would be up against new language, new habits, and new climate, and all you would have is yourself. Would you survive or collapse? Could you make friends, get food, shelter and the like, or would you simply lie there and moan about how unfortunate you were to have this catastrophe visited on you? If you need external security, you’d perish, for all of your goods would have been taken away. But if you have internal security and are not afraid of the unknown, then you would survive.

Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them; things are forbidden to them that every honorable man will do any day in the year and other things are allowed to them that are generally despised. Each person must stand on his own feet.*

Try to view each decision not as a monumental life-changing event, but in perspective. Carlos Castaneda calls a man of knowledge one who— Lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting…He knows that his life will be over altogether too soon; he knows, because he sees, that nothing is more important than anything else…. Thus a man of knowledge sweats and puffs and if one looks at him he is just like any ordinary man, except that the folly of his life is under control. Nothing being more important than anything else, a man of knowledge chooses any act, and acts it out as if it mattered to him. His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn’t; so when he fulfills his acts he retreats in peace, and whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn’t, is in no way any part of his concern*