Psycho-Cybernetics (Updated and Expanded)

by Maxwell Maltz

self-image is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self-image and you change the personality and the behavior.

Key Points from Chapter 1

Positive thinking” does indeed “work” when it is consistent with the individual’s self-image.

Key points from Chapter 1

brain and nervous system constitute a marvelous and complex “goal-striving mechanism,” a sort of built-in automatic guidance system that works for you as a “success mechanism,” or against you as a “failure mechanism,”

Key points from chapter 1

It is not the child who is taught about love but the child who has experienced love that grows into a healthy, happy, well-adjusted adult. Our present state of self-confidence and poise is the result of what we have experienced rather than what we have learned intellectually.

Key points from chapter 1

Both experimental and clinical psychology have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail.

Key points from chapter 1

Lecky conceived of the personality as a “system of ideas,” all of which must seem to be consistent with one another. Ideas that are inconsistent with the system are rejected, “not believed,” and not acted on. Ideas that seem to be consistent with the system are accepted.

When it is an object of shame, you attempt to hide it rather than express it. Creative expression is blocked. You become hostile and hard to get along with.

Key points from chapter 1

Happiness, success, peace of mind, or whatever your own conception of supreme good may be, is experienced in its essence as more life.