Psycho-Cybernetics Quotes

“You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life

“Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a ‘real’ experience.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life

“It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life

“Skill in any performance whether it be in sports in playing the piano in conversation or in selling merchandise consists not in painfully and consciously thinking out each action as it is performed but in relaxing and letting the job do itself through you. Creative performance is spontaneous and ‘natural’ as opposed to self-conscious and studied.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life

“Conscious effort inhibits and ‘jams’ the automatic creative mechanism.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life

“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".”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“Adopt the motto—"It doesn't matter who's right, but what's right.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“You make mistakes. Mistakes don't make you.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics

“Our present state of self-confidence and poise is the result of what we have "experienced" rather than what we have learned intellectually.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life

“The "Success-type" personality is composed of: S-ense of direction U—nderstanding C-ourage C-harity E-steem S-elf-Confidence S-elf-Acceptance.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“He must have a burning desire to solve the problem. But after he has defined the problem sees in his imagination the desired end result secured all the information and facts that he can then additional struggling fretting and worrying over it does not help but seems to hinder the solution.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life

“The important thing for you to remember is that it does not matter in the least how you got the idea or where it came from. You may never have met a professional hypnotist. You may never have been formally hypnotized. But if you have accepted an idea - from yourself, your teachers, your parents, friends, advertisements, from any other source - and further, if you are firmly convinced that idea is true, it has the same power over you as the hypnotist's words have over the hypnotized subject.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“Our errors, mistakes, failures, and sometimes even our humiliations, were necessary steps in the learning process. However, they were meant to be means to an end - and not an end in themselves. When they have served their purpose, they should be forgotten. If we consciously dwell on 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" that is consciously held in imagination and memory.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“The self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment. It defines what you can and cannot do. Expand the self-image and you expand the “area of the possible.” The development of an adequate, realistic self-image will seem to imbue the individual with new capabilities, new talents, and literally turn failure into success.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“I don't like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything," said Henry Ward Beecher.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“Get yourself a goal worth working for.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“Functionally, a man is somewhat like a bicycle,” I told him. “A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it is going forward towards something. You have a good bicycle. Your trouble is you are trying to maintain your balance sitting still, with no place to go. It’s no wonder you feel shaky.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“The individual who is actively engaged in a struggle, or in striving toward an important goal, does not come up with pessimistic philosophies concerning the meaninglessness or the futility of life.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“Dr. Norton L. Williams, a psychiatrist, addressing a medical convention, said that modern man’s anxiety and insecurity stemmed from a lack of self-realization, and that inner security can only be found “in finding in oneself an individuality, uniqueness, and distinctiveness that is akin to the idea of being created in the image of God.” He also said that self-realization is gained by “a simple belief in one’s own uniqueness as a human being, a sense of deep and wide awareness of all people and all things, and a feeling of constructive influencing of others through one’s own personality.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes. —William E. Gladstone”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“I have found that one of the commonest causes of unhappiness among my patients is that they are attempting to live their lives on the deferred payment plan. They do not live, or enjoy life now, but wait for some future event or occurrence. They will be happy when they get married, when they get a better job, when they get the house paid for, when they get the children through college, when they have completed some task or won some victory. Invariably, they are disappointed.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere. —Ralph Waldo Emerson”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“Stop measuring yourself against “their” standards. You are not “them” and can never measure up. Neither can “they” measure up to yours—nor should they. Once you see this simple, rather self-evident truth, accept it, and believe it, your inferior feelings will vanish.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“You act, and feel, not according to what things are really like, but according to the image your mind holds of what they are like. You have certain mental images of yourself, your world, and the people around you, and you behave as though these images were the truth, the reality, rather than the things they represent.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“You must have a clear mental picture of the correct thing before you can do it successfully.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“If you can remember, worry, or tie your shoe, you can succeed.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information that you give to it from your forebrain. Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you think or imagine to be true.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“It doesn’t matter how many times you have failed in the past. What matters is the successful attempt, which should be remembered, reinforced, and dwelt upon.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“I have found one of the most effective means of helping people achieve an adequate or successful personality is to first of all give them a graphic picture of what the successful personality looks like. Remember, the creative guidance mechanism within you is a goal-striving mechanism, and the first requisite for using it is to have a clear-cut goal or target to shoot for. A great many people want to improve themselves, and long for a better personality, but have no clear-cut idea of the direction in which improvement lies, or what constitutes a good personality. A good personality is one that enables you to deal effectively and appropriately with environment and reality, and to gain satisfaction from reaching goals that are important to you.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

“Then, consciously decide that throughout the day: 1. I will be as cheerful as possible. 2. I will try to feel and act a little more friendly toward other people. 3. I am going to be a little less critical and a little more tolerant of other people, their faults, failings, and mistakes. I will place the best possible interpretation on their actions. 4. Insofar as possible, I am going to act as if successes are inevitable, and I already am the sort of personality I want to be. I will practice “acting like” and “feeling like” this new personality. 5. I will not let my own opinion color facts in a pessimistic or negative way. 6. I will practice smiling at least three times during the day. 7. Regardless of what happens, I will react as calmly and as intelligently as possible. 8. I will ignore completely and close my mind to all those pessimistic and negative “facts” that I can do nothing to change.”
― Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded