Your Erroneous Zones

by Wayne W. Dyer

Being healthy is a natural state, and the means for achieving it are within the grasp of each one of us. I believe that a judicious mixture of hard work, clear thinking, humor and self-confidence are the ingredients of effective living. I do not believe in fancy formulas, or historical excursions into your past to discover that you were “harshly toilet trained” and that someone else is responsible for your unhappiness.

The essence of greatness is the ability to choose personal fulfillment in circumstances where others choose madness.

Look over your shoulder. You will notice a constant companion. For want of a better name, call him Your-Own-Death. You can fear this visitor or use him for your personal gain. The choice is up to you. 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.

Think back to the time you were learning to drive a stick shift automobile. You were faced with what seemed to be an insurmountable problem. Three pedals but only two feet to make them work. You first became aware of the complexity of the task. Let the clutch out slow, ooops too fast, jerky business, gas pedal down at the same rate as you release the clutch, right foot for the brake, but the clutch must go in, or you jerk again. A million mental signals: always thinking, using your brain. What do I do? Awareness, and then after thousands of trials, mistakes, new efforts, the day comes when you step into your car and drive away. No stalling, no jerking and no thinking. Driving a stick shift has become second nature, and how did you do it? With great difficulty. Lots of present-moment thinking, reminding, working.

Taking charge of yourself involves more than simply trying on new thoughts for size. It requires a determination to be happy and to challenge and destroy each and every thought that creates a self-immobilizing unhappiness in you.

The issue here is your own ability to choose happiness or at least not to choose unhappiness at any given moment of your life. A mind-blowing notion perhaps, but one that you should consider carefully before rejecting, since to discard it is to give up on yourself. To reject it is to believe that someone else instead of you is in charge of you. But choosing to be happy might seem easier than some things which daily confound your life.

immobilized by the feeling. Immobilization can range from total inaction to mild indecision and hesitancy. Does your anger keep you from saying, feeling, or doing something? If so, then you are immobilized. Does your shyness prevent you from meeting people you want to know? If so, you are immobilized and missing out on experiences that are rightfully yours. Is your hate and jealousy helping you to grow an ulcer or to raise your blood pressure? Does it keep you from working effectively on the job? Are you unable to sleep or make love because of a negative present-moment feeling? These are all signs of immobilization. Immobilization: A state, however mild or serious, in which you are not functioning at the level that you would like to. If feelings lead to such a state, you need to look no further for a reason to get rid of them. Here is a brief checklist of some instances in which you may be immobilized. They range from minor to major states of immobility.

As you look back on your life, much the way Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych did, you’ll find that you seldom experience regret for anything that you’ve done. It is what you haven’t done that will torment you. The message, therefore, is clear. Do it! Develop an appreciation for the present moment. Seize every second of your life and savor it. Value your present moments. Using them up in any self-defeating ways means you’ve lost them forever.

You can be motivated out of a desire to grow rather than a need to repair your deficiencies. If you recognize that you can always grow, improve, become more and greater, that is enough.

You may have a social disease, one that will not go away with a simple injection. You are quite possibly infected with the sepsis of low-esteem, and the only known cure is a massive dose of self-love. But perhaps, like many in our society, you’ve grown up with the idea that loving yourself is wrong. Think of others, society tells us. Love thy neighbor, the church admonishes. What nobody seems to remember is love thyself, and yet that is precisely what you’re going to have to learn to do if you are to achieve present-moment happiness.

I know of a thirty-two-year-old man, Frank, who has learned to reject all of his bodily functions labeling them as disgusting and unmentionable. Frank is compulsively clean about his body to the point of being uncomfortable whenever he sweats, and he expects the same kind of starchy-clean behavior from his wife and children. He rushes for the shower to rid himself of any offensive odors after mowing the lawn or playing a set of tennis. Moreover, he cannot have sex unless both he and his wife shower before and after. He cannot tolerate his own normal body odors, nor can he live with anyone who is more accepting of himself. Frank sprays his bathroom, uses a multitude of cosmetic products to keep himself smelling good, and he is concerned about anyone else disliking him when he becomes human and begins smelling like one. Frank has learned to reject his natural body functions and odors. He has adopted attitudes that reflect personal self-rejection, by either being embarrassed or apologetic whenever he allows his body to be natural. But being human means having many natural odors, and the person who is working at self-love and self-acceptance is in no way offended by his natural self. In fact, if Frank were to be totally honest about himself, and wiped out the learned messages of self-rejection, he might even be able to admit to enjoying his own body and all of the glorious odors it is capable of producing. While he might not wish to share those odors with others, he would at l...

The logic of being able to choose your self-pictures applies to all of the photographs of you that are lodged in your brain. You are as socially adept as you choose to be. If you dislike the way you behave socially, you can work at changing the behavior and not confusing it with your own self-worth.

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.”

Be able to avoid any and all risks that go with establishing love relationships with others, and thereby eliminate any possibility of ever being rejected or disapproved.

Be able to use up your present moments with mini-depressions, and avoid behavior that would help you to be different. Your self-pity will serve as your escape route.

• Eliminate jealousy by recognizing it is a put-down of yourself. By comparing yourself to some other person and imagining you are loved less, you make others more important than you. You are measuring your own merit in comparison to another. Remind yourself that (1) Someone can always choose another without having it be a reflection on you, and (2) whether or not you are chosen by any significant other is not the way you validate your own self-worth. If you make it that way, you are doomed to eternal self-doubt, because of the uncertainty of how a particular someone out there is going to feel at any precise moment of any given day. Should he/she choose another, that choice reflects only the other, not you. With practice at self-love, any circumstances in which you’ve previously found yourself to be jealous will be reversed. You’ll believe so much in you that you won’t need the love or approval of others to give you value.

You can stop equating your performance in anything with your own self-worth. You may lose your job, or fail a given project. You may not like the way you performed this or that task. But that doesn’t mean that you are without worth. You must know for yourself, that you are worth something regardless of your achievements. Without this knowledge, you will be persistently confusing yourself with your external activities. It is just as absurd to make your self-value depend upon some outside accomplishment as it is to tie it in with some external person’s opinion of you. Once you eliminate this confusion, you will be able to set about all kinds of undertakings, and your final score—while it may be interesting to you—will in no way determine how valuable you are as a person.

The need for approval of another person is bad enough, but the real trouble comes with the need for the approval of everyone for every act. If you carry around such a need, then you are bound for a great deal of misery and frustration in your life. Moreover, you will be incorporating a wishy-washy non-person self-image that will result in the kind of self-rejection that was discussed in the previous chapter. The need for approval must go! No question marks here. It must be eradicated from your life if you are to gain personal fulfillment. Such need is a psychological dead end, with absolutely no benefits accruing to you.

When approval-seeking is a need, the possibilities for truth are all but wiped away. If you must be lauded, and you send out those kinds of signals, then no one can deal with you straight. Nor can you state with confidence what it is that you think and feel at any present moment of your life. Your self is sacrificed to the opinions and predelictions of others. Politicians as a class are generally not trusted. Their need for approval is prodigious. Without it they are out of work. Therefore, they often seem to speak out of both sides of their mouths, saying this to please Group A, and that to win the approbation of Group B. There can be no truth when the speaker is shifty and moves around the issues with a skillful kind of manuevering that is designed to please everyone. Behavior like this is easy to spot in politicians, but more difficult to see in ourselves. Perhaps you’ve “cooled-it” in order to placate someone or you’ve found yourself agreeing with someone whose disfavor you fear. You knew you would be unhappy if you were censured, so you modified your behavior to avoid it. It

As a child you wanted to think for yourself, to rely on yourself. If your Dad was helping you put on your coat when you were small, you said, “I can do it myself.” But too often the message in return was “I’ll do it for you. We don’t have time to wait,” or “You’re too little.” That spark of independence, that desire to be your own person, which was so alive in you as a child, was often dampened with rely on Mommy or Daddy. If you don’t, we’ll disapprove and when we disapprove of you, you must disapprove of yourself. The family unit nurtures, in the form of good intentions, dependence and the need for approval. Parents who don’t want any harm to come to their children resolve to protect them from danger. The result, however, is the opposite of that intended, for without the ammunition of knowing how to rely on the self in times of strife (solving one’s own disputes, dealing with insults, fighting for honor, earning one’s own way), it is impossible to build an arsenal of independent behavior for a lifetime.

Approval-Seeking Messages from School When you left home and arrived in school, you entered an institution that is designed expressly to instill approval-seeking thinking and behavior. Ask permission to do everything. Never bank on your own judgment. Ask the teacher to go to the bathroom. Sit in a particular seat. Don’t leave it under penalty of a demerit. Everything was geared toward other-control. Instead of learning to think you were being taught not to think for yourself. Fold your paper into sixteen squares, and don’t write on the folds. Study chapters one and two tonight. Practice these words in spelling. Draw like this. Read that. You were taught to be obedient. And if in doubt, check it out with the teacher. If you should incur the teacher’s, or worse yet, the principal’s wrath, you were expected to feel guilty for months. Your report card was a message to your parents telling them

Trying to impress others with your knowledge of something that you know nothing about by “faking it.” • Begging for compliments by setting yourself up for approval, and then feeling bad when they don’t come. • Being unhappy about someone you respect having a contrary point of view, and expressing it to you.

You can actively seek disapproval and work on yourself to not be upset. Select someone who is bound to disagree and, flying in the face of the disapproval, maintain your position calmly. You’ll get better at not being upset, and not having to alter your own views. You’ll be telling yourself that you expect this “contrariness,” that it’s all right for them to be the way they are, and that it really has nothing to do with you. By going after disapproval, rather than avoiding it, you’ll build up your repertoire of behavior for dealing effectively with it.

You can vow until you’re orange in the face that you can handle disfavor and that you are not going to demand tribute from everyone, but until you are faced with the circumstances of contention you won’t know how you are doing. If you can eliminate this troublesome erroneous zone from your life, the rest will seem easy, because you have been conditioned to need approval from your first breath on this earth. It will require a great deal of practice, but it is worth every bit of effort you put into it. Immunity from despair in the face of disapproval is the ticket to a lifetime of delectable personal present-moment freedom.

Have a conversation with the people in your life who you feel are most responsible for many of your I’ms. (Parents, long-time family friends, old teachers, grandparents, etc.) Ask them how they think you got to be the way you are and if you’ve always been that way. Tell them you are determined to change and see if they believe you are capable. You’ll be surprised at their own interpretations and how they feel you can’t be any different, since “You’ve always been that way.”

Throughout life, the two most futile emotions are guilt for what has been done and worry about what might be done. There they are! The great wastes—Worry and Guilt—Guilt and Worry. As you examine these two erroneous zones, you will begin to see how connected they are; in fact they can be viewed as opposite ends of the same zone. There you have it. Guilt means that you use up your present moments being immobilized as a result of past behavior, while worry is the contrivance that keeps you

There are two days in the week about which and upon which I never worry. Two carefree days, kept sacredly free from fear and apprehension. One of these days is yesterday…and the other day I do not worry about is tomorrow.

Why have you bought the worry and guilt messages that have been laid on you over the years? Largely because it is considered “bad” if you don’t feel guilty, and “inhuman” not to worry. It all has to do with CARING. If you really care about anyone, or anything, then you show this concern by feeling guilty about the terrible things you’ve done, or by giving some visible evidence that you are concerned about their future. It is almost as if you have to demonstrate your neurosis in order to be labeled a caring person. Guilt is the most useless of all erroneous zone behaviors. It is by far the greatest waste of emotional energy. Why? Because, by definition, you are feeling immobilized in the present over something that has already taken place, and no amount of guilt can ever change history.

Self-imposed Guilt. This second category of guilt reactions is a much more troublesome area. Here the individual is being immobilized by things he has done recently, but which are not necessarily tied to being a child. This is the guilt imposed on the self when an adult rule or moral code is broken. The individual may feel bad for a long time even though the hurting can do nothing to change what has happened. Typical self-imposed guilt includes having told someone off, and hating one’s self for it, or being emotionally drained in the present moment because of some act such as shoplifting, not going to church, or having said the wrong thing in the past. Thus you can look at all of your guilt either as reactions to leftover imposed standards in which you are still trying to please an absent authority figure, or as the result of trying to live up to self-imposed standards which you really don’t buy, but for some reason pay lip service to. In either case, it is stupid, and, more important, useless behavior. You can sit there forever, lamenting about how bad you’ve been, feeling guilty until your death, and not one tiny slice of that guilt will do anything to rectify past behavior. It’s over! Your guilt is an attempt to change history, to wish that it weren’t so. But history is so and you can’t do anything about it.

Think of yourself as being alive in 1860, at the beginning of the Civil War. The country is mobilizing for war, and there are approximately thirty-two million people in the United States. Each of those thirty-two million folks has hundreds of things to worry about and they spend many present moments agonizing about the future. They worry about war, the price of food, the draughts, the economy, all the things that you worry about today. In 1975, some 115 years later, all of those worriers are dead and all their combined worrying did not change a moment of what is now history. The same is true of your own worry times.

Much of your worry concerns things over which you have no control. You can worry all you want about war, or the economy, or possible illness, but worry won’t bring peace or prosperity or health. As an individual you have little control over any of those things. Moreover the catastrophe you’re worrying about frequently turns out to be less horrible in reality than it was in your imagination.

As a young scout you were told to Be Prepared. But how can you prepare for the unknown? Obviously, you cannot! Therefore avoid it and you’ll never end up with egg on your face. Be safe, don’t take risks, follow the road maps—even if it is dull. Perhaps you’re getting tired of all that certainty, knowing what every day will be like before it has been lived. You can’t grow if you already know the answers before the questions have even been asked. Probably the times you most remember are those in which you were spontaneously alive, doing whatever you wanted, and delightfully anticipating the mysterious. We hear the cultural messages of certainty throughout life. They began with family and are reinforced by educators. The child learns to avoid experimentation and is encouraged to avoid the unknown. Don’t get lost. Have the right answers. Stay with your own kind. If you still cling to these fearful encouragements to security, now is the time to break free. Get rid of the idea that you can’t try out new and doubtful behavior. You can if you choose to. It begins with an understanding of your conditioned

dear reader, have you really lived 10,000 or more days or have you lived one day, 10,000 or more times? A good question to ask yourself as you work toward more spontaneity in your life.

A plan is not necessarily unhealthy, but falling in love with the plan is the real neurosis. You may have a life plan for what you’ll do at age 25, 30, 40, 50, 70, etc., and then you simply consult your agenda to see where you ought to be, rather than making a new decision each day and having a strong enough belief in yourself to be able to alter the plan. Don’t let the plan become bigger than you.

You may be surprised to hear this, but failure does not exist. Failure is simply someone else’s opinion of how a certain act should have been completed. Once you believe that no act must be performed in any specific other-directed way, then failing becomes impossible.

Living in the same neighborhood, city or state, simply because your parents and their parents happened to have chosen that location. Being afraid of a new place because the people, climate, politics, language, customs, or whatever, are different.

Compulsive achievement in school or on the job. Grades are more important than anything else. The fitness report matters more than the pleasure of work well done. Using achievement rewards as substitutes for trying something new and unknown. Residing in the safe areas of inquiry because, “I know I can get an A,” rather than risking a C by embarking on a new discipline. Taking the safe job where you know you’ll be successful instead of entering a new race and taking a chance on failing.

Whenever you find yourself avoiding the unknown, ask yourself, “What’s the worst thing that could happen to me?” You’ll probably see that the fears of the unknown are out of proportion to the reality of the consequences.

Remind yourself that the fear of failure is very often the fear of someone else’s disapproval or ridicule. If you let them have their own opinions, which have nothing to do with you, you can begin to evaluate your behavior in your own, rather than their terms. You’ll come to see your abilities not as better or worse, but as simply different from others.

Indecisiveness As a Spin-Off of Right vs. Wrong Thinking I once asked a client if he had trouble making a decision, and he said, “Well—Yes and No.” Perhaps you have difficulty with decision-making, even with small things. This is a direct outgrowth of the inclination to divide things into right and wrong categories. The indecision comes from wanting to be right, and the postponement of a choice keeps you from dealing with the anxiety that you choose for yourself whenever you feel you’ve been wrong. Once you take away the rightness and wrongness of every decision (because right implies a guarantee), then decision-making will become a snap. If you are trying to decide on the right college to attend, you might stay immobilized forever, even after you’ve made the decision, because maybe it wasn’t right. Instead, shift the process to, “

Once you give up those inaccurate and self-destructive rights and wrongs, you’ll find decision-making a simple matter of weighing which consequences you’d prefer at a given present-moment. And if you begin to choose regret over the decision, rather than deciding that regret is a waste of your time (because it keeps you living in the past) you’ll simply resolve to make a different decision in your next present moment, one that will bring consequences that the earlier decision failed to bring. But never attempting to put it into a right or wrong categorization.

helpful to your children and always work hard? And if at any time you fail in one of these shoulds do you berate yourself and hence take on that strain and disturbance to which Karen Horney alludes above? But perhaps these are not your shoulds. If, in fact, they belong to others and you have merely borrowed them, then you are musterbating.

Begin with insight into your own behavior. Study the neurotic dividends spelled out above. Then ask yourself why are you burdening yourself with so many shoulds. Ask yourself if you really believe in them, or if you’ve just become accustomed to behaving that way. • List all of the rules you abide by, which just don’t seem to apply. Those stupid conventional behaviors that you complain about, but can’t seem to shed. Then, make your own “Rules of Conduct” that make the greatest amount of sense to you. Write them down, even if you don’t believe at this time that you are capable of living them out. • Start your own traditions. For example, if you’ve always decorated your Christmas Tree on Christmas Eve, and you’d rather do it three days before, begin a new Christmas tradition—one that makes sense to you. • Have a consultation with your relatives and friends about the many rules of conduct you all follow which you find distasteful. Perhaps you’ll be able to bring about some new rules which appear to be more reasonable to everyone. You’ll discover that the old rules are still in effect only because no one ever seriously thought to challenge them in the past.

Judy ran her marriage on a tally sheet. One for you, one for me. Everything must be fair. If I act this way, you must act the same way. It was no wonder she was hurt and resentful most of the time, more concerned with righting imaginary injustices than examining and perhaps improving her marriage. Judy’s search for justice was a neurotic dead end. She was assessing her husband’s behavior on the basis of her own and her happiness on the basis of her husband’s behavior. Were she to stop her incessant keeping track and begin going after the things she wants without having to be in debt to the other, then her relationship would improve significantly.

It’s one way to make yourself feel superior and better. As long as you insist on a mythological justice system for everything and are careful to keep your tally sheet in balance, you’ll hold onto your holier than thou feeling and use up your present moments with smugness rather than effective living. • You can give up responsibility for yourself and justify being immobilized by shifting the responsibility to those people and events that are not fair. A scapegoating for your lack of ability to be and feel what you choose. In this way, you can avoid risks, and the hard work of change. As long as injustice is the cause of your problems you can never change until the injustice goes away, which, of course, it never will. • Injustice can win you attention, pity and self-pity. The world has been unjust to you and now you and everyone around you must feel sorry for you. This is another great technique for avoiding change. The attention, pity and self-pity are your rewards, and you use them to prop yourself up rather than take charge of yourself and eliminate comparison behavior.

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

Set up your own standards of conduct in your family based upon what you think is appropriate for you. Have everyone else do the same. Then see if it isn’t quite possible to make it happen without infringing on each other’s rights. If you feel that being out three nights a week is what you want, but can’t because someone has to watch the children, “fairness” doesn’t have to enter into your decision-making. Perhaps you make some kind of baby-sitting arrangement, or have the kids go along, or whatever will be a mutually satisfying settlement. But to bring in the “It isn’t fair” routine will surely lead to everyone’s resentment—and to staying at home as well. Be a doer, not a complainer about injustice. For every injustice you suffer, there is a resolution that does not require you to be immobilized in any way.

Mark, a recent client of mine, came to me complaining about his unhappy marriage. Mark was in his fifties and had been married for almost thirty years. As we began to talk about his marriage, it became clear that Mark’s complaints were long-standing. “It’s never been any good, even from the beginning,” he said at one point. I asked Mark what had made him hold on for all these years of misery. “I kept hoping things would get better,” he confessed. Almost thirty years of hope and Mark and his wife were still miserable.

By avoiding a task you can escape success. If you don’t succeed you avoid having to feel good about yourself and accepting all of the continuing responsibility that goes with success.

Longevity is not an indication of success in marriage. Many people stay married out of fear of the unknown, or because of inertia, or simply because it is the thing to do. In a successful marriage, a marriage where both partners feel genuine love, each is willing to let the other person choose for himself rather than to dominate. There is not the constant hassling that involves thinking and speaking for the other partner, and demanding that he does what he’s supposed to. Dependency is the serpent in the paradise of a happy marriage. It creates patterns of dominance and submission and ultimately destroys relationships. This erroneous zone can be eliminated, but it will never be an easy battle, since power and control are at stake, and few want to give them up without a fight.