Your Erroneous Zones

by Wayne W. Dyer

depends on individuals who are innovators, who reject convention and fashion their own worlds. In order to shift from coping to doing, you’ll have to learn to resist enculturation and the many pressures to conform. To function fully, a resistance to enculturation is almost a given. You may be viewed by some as insubordinate, which is the price you’ll pay for thinking for yourself. You may be seen as different,

be labeled selfish or rebellious, incur disapproval from many “normal” people, and at times be ostracized. Some people will not take kindly to your resistance to norms they’ve adopted for themselves. You’ll hear the old argument of, “What if everybody decided to obey only the rules they wanted

What we are striving for is choice, that is, the ability to be free from the servant mentality of constant adherence to the shoulds.

Leading your own life involves flexibility and repeated personal assessments of how well the rule works at a particular present moment. True, it’s often easier to follow, to blindly do as you’re told, but once you recognize that the law is there to serve you, not to make you a servant, you can begin to eliminate that musterbation behavior.

movement. You can decide to be the person you want to be, or the one others want you to be. It’s up to you.

sign, or even assuming that it doesn’t belong there in the first place. People make signs and people also make mistakes.

Basically your chore in scrubbing up this zone involves risk-taking. Doing! Resolving to be different than the way you’ve been taught is proper when that way doesn’t work for you. Here are some tactics that will be helpful in getting out of your musterbatory habits.

• Get rid of the roles that you (and others) are assuming in your life. Be whatever you want to be, rather than what you think you are supposed to be because you are a man, woman, middle-aged, or whatever.

Refuse for a given segment of a conversation to focus on others. Practice in ever-increasing time periods not projecting blame, or talking about another person, event, or idea in a complaining or fault-finding manner.

• Stop waiting for others to change. Ask yourself why others should be different simply because you would like it better if they were. R...

What a beautiful thought. Stay with tradition and you ensure that you’ll always be the same, but toss it aside, and the world is yours to use as creatively as you choose.

Instead of thinking of anything as being unfair, you can decide what you really want, and then set about devising strategies for attaining it, independent of what anyone else in the world wants or does.

• Complaining that others make more money for doing the same work.