Practice Exercise Number 1.
Get a New Mental Picture of Yourself
You cannot merely imagine a new self-image; unless you feel that it is a based upon truth. Experience has shown that when a person does change his self-image, he has the feeling that for one reason or another, he “sees”, or realizes the truth about himself.
1. Your built-in success mechanism must have a goal or “target”. This goal, or target, must be conceived of as ‘already in existence-now’ either in actual or potential form. It operates by either 1) steering you to a goal already in existence or by 2) ‘discovering’ something already in existence.
2. The automatic mechanism is teleological, that is, operates, or must be oriented to “end results” goals.
3. Do not be afraid of making mistakes, or of temporary failures.
4. Skill learning of any kind is accomplished by trial and error.
5. You must learn to trust your creative mechanism to do its work and not “jam it” by becoming too concerned or too anxious is to whether it will work or not, or by attempting to force it by too much conscious effort.
“No matter what the situation is, you can prepare for it beforehand by means of imagining yourself and your prospect face to face while he is raising objections and creating problems and you handling them properly.
Instead of trying hard by conscious effort to do the things by iron-jawed will power, and all the while worrying and picturing to yourself all the things that are likely to go wrong, you simply relax the strain, strop trying to “do it” by strain and effort, picture to yourself the target you really want to hit, and “let” your creative success mechanism take over. Thus, mental-picturing the desired end result, literally forces you to use “positive thinking”.
As Dr. Leslie D Weatherhead has said, “If we have in our minds a picture of ourselves as fear-haunted and defeated nobodies, we must get rid of that picture it and once and hold up our heads.
If you have been fearful and anxious in certain situations – see yourself acting calmly and deliberately, acting with confidence and courage – and feeling expensive and confident because you are.
He also said the 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.
How to use relaxation to dehypnotize yourself
These memories of past failures do no harm as long our conscious thought and attention is focused upon the positive goal to be accomplished. Therefore, it is best to let these sleeping dogs lie.
Lecky found that there were two powerful “levels” for changing beliefs and concepts. There are “standard” convictions which are strongly held by nearly everyone. These are (1) the feeling or belief that one is capable of doing his share, holding up his end of the log, exerting a certain amount of independence and (2) the belief that there is “something” inside you which should not be allowed to suffer indignities.
Consciously practice the habit of “taking no anxious thought for tomorrow” by giving all your attention to the moment.
Another similar mental device which I have found very helpful to my patients is telling them: “Your success mechanism can help you do any job, perform any task, solve any problem. Think of yourself as ‘feeding’ jobs and problems to your success mechanism as a scientist ‘feeds’ a problem to an electronic brain”.
If you have been wrestling with a problem all day without making any apparent progress, try dismissing it from your mind, and put off making a decision until you’ve had a chance to “sleep on it”.
Habits on the other hand are merely reactions and responses which we have learned to perform automatically without having to think or decide. They are performed by our creative mechanism.
Fully as per cent of our behavior, feeling, and response is habitual.
Tomorrow morning determine which show you put on first and how you tie your shoes. Now, consciously decide that for the next 21 days you are going to form a new habit b putting on the other show first and trying your laces in a different way. Now, each morning as you decide to put on your shoes in a certain manner, let this simple act serve as a reminder to change other habitual ways of thinking, acting and feeling throughout that one day.
1. I will be as cheerful as possible.
2. I will try to feel and act a little more friendly toward 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 upon their actions.
4. Insofar as possible, i am going to act as if success were inevitable, an 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 a negative way.
6. I will practice smiling at least 3 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” which I can do nothing to change.
Develop a “nostalgia for the future” instead of for the past. The “forward look” and a “nostalgia for the future” can keep you youthful.
The success-type personality not only does not cheat and lie to other people, he learns to be honest with himself. What we call “sincerity” is itself based upon self-understanding and self-honesty. For no man can be sincere who lies to himself by “rationalizing” or telling himself “rational-lies”.
So must you admit your mistakes and errors but dont cry over them. Correct them and go forward. In dealing with other people try to see the situation from their point of view as well as your own.
You must daily have the courage to risk making mistakes, risk failure, risk being humiliated. A step in the wrong direction is better than staying “on the spot” all your life.
Successful personalities have some interest in and regard for other people. They have a respect for other’s problems and needs. They respect the dignity of human personality and deal with other people as if they were human beings, rather than pawns in their own game.
The person who feels that “people are not very important” cannot have very much deep-down self-respect and self-regard for he himself is “people” and with what judgement he considers others, he himself is unwittingly judged in his own mind.
It doesn’t matter who’s right, but what’s right.
Prescription
(1) Try to develop a genuine appreciation for people by realizing the truth abut them; they are children of God, unique personalities, creative beings
(2) Take the trouble to stop and think of the other person’s feelings, his view points, his desires and needs. Think more of what the other fellow wants, and how he must feel. A friend of mine kids his wife by telling her, wherever she asks him, “Do you love me?” -Yes, whenever I stop and think about it”. There is a lot of truth in this. We cannot feel anything about other people unless we ” stop and think ” about them. Act as if other people are important and treat them accordingly. In your treatment of people have regard for their feelings. We tend to feel about objects in accordance with the way we treat them.
The person with adequate self-esteem doesn’t feel hostile toward others, he isn’t out to prove anything, he can see facts more clearly, isn’t as demanding in his claims on other people.
Stop carrying around a mental picture of yourself as a defeated, worthless person, stop dramatizing yourself as an object of pity and injustice. Use the practice exercises in this book to build up an adequate self-image.
The biggest secret of self-esteem is this: Begin to appreciate other people more; show respect for any human being merely because he is a child of God and “therefore” a ” a thing of value”.
Stop and think when you’re dealing with people. You’re dealing with a unique, individual creation of the creator of all. Practice treating other people as if they had some value- and surprisingly enough you own self-esteem will go up.
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.
You may have made a mistake, but this does not mean that you are a mistake.
Accepts yourself as you are and start from there. Learn to emotionally tolerate imperfection in yourself.
I may not be perfect, I may have faults and weaknesses, I might have gotten off the track, I may have a long way to go- but I am something and I will make the most of that something.”
The failure-type personality does not direct his aggressiveness toward the accomplishment of a worthwhile goal. Instead t is used in such self-destructive channels as ulcers, high blood pressure, worry, excessive smoking, compulsive overwork, or it may be turned upon other persons in the form of irritability, rudeness, gossip, nagging, fault finding.
It doesn’t work. You don’t solve one problem by creating another. If you feel like snapping at someone; stop and ask yourself- ” Is this merely my own frustration at work? what has frustrated me?”
The insecure person feels that he should be “good” -period. He should be “successful” period. He should be “happy”, competent, poised-period. These are all worthy goals. But they should be thought of, at least in their absolute sense, as goals to be achieved, as something to reach for, rather than as ” shoulds”.
It is insecure trying to stand on the top as a pinacle, “mentally get down off your high-horse and you will feel more secure”.
Loneliness is a way of self-protection. Lines of communication with other people -and especially any emotional ties – are cut down. it is a way to protect our idealized self against exposure, hurt, humiliation. The lonely personality is afraid of other people.
Develop some social skill that will add to the happiness of people: dancing, bridge, playing the piano, tennis, conversation. It is an old psychological axiom that constant exposure to the object of fear immunizes against the fear.
“The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of making one”.
many people are indecisive because they fear loss of self-esteem if they are proved wrong. Use self-esteem for yourself, instead of against yourself, by convincing yourself of this truth. Big men and big personalities make mistakes and admit them. it is the little man who is afraid to admit he has been wrong.
Resentment is an attempt to make our own failure palatable, by explaining i in terms of unfair treatment, injustice.
Resentment is also a “way” of making us feel important. Many people get a perverse satisfaction from feeling “wronged”. The victim o injustice, the one who has been unfairly treated, is morally superior to those who causes the injustice.
Resentment is an emotional rehashing, or re-fighting of some event past. You cannot win, because you are attempting to do the impossible – change the past.
Resentment, even when based upon real injustices and wrongs is not the way to win. It soon becomes an emotional habit.
Remember that your resentment is not caused by other persons, events or circumstances. It is caused by your own emotional response-your own reaction.
If everyone else should be dedicated to making you happy, you will be resentful when it doesn’t work out that way. If you feel that other people “owe” you eternal gratitude, undying appreciation, or continual recognition of your superlative worth, you will feel resentment when these “debts” are not paid. If life owes you a living, you become resentful when it isn’t forthcoming.
Resentment is therefore inconsistent with creative goalstriving. In creative goal-striving you are the actor, not the passive recipient. You set your goals. No one owes you anything you go out after your own goals. You become responsible for your own success, and happiness. Resentment doesn’t fit into this picture, and because it doesn’t it is a “failure mechanism”.
A person who has the capacity to enjoy still alive within him finds enjoyment in many ordinary and simple things in life. He also enjoys whatever success in a material way why he has achieved.
Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively. You either have no goal that is important enough to you, or you are not using your talents and efforts in striving toward an important goal.
Real success never hurt anyone, Striving for goals which are important to you, not as status symbols, but because they are consistent with your own deep inner wants, is healthful.
Self Fulfilled persons have the following characteristics:
1. They see themselves as liked, wanted, acceptable and able individuals.
2. They have a high degree of acceptance of themselves as they are.
3. They have a feeling of oneness with others.
4. They have a rich store of information and knowledge.
There Rules for Imunizing yourself Against Emotional Hurts
(1) Be too big too feel threatened: When a person has adequate self-esteem little slights offer no threat at all- they are simply “passed over” and ignored.
(2) A self-reliant, responsible attitude makes you less vulnerable: But the creative, self-reliant person also feels a need to give love. His emphasis is a much or more on the giving as on the getting. He doesn’t expect love to be handed to him on a silver platter. Nor does he have a compulsive need that “everybody” must love him and approve of him. He has sufficient ego-security to tolerate the fact that a certain number of people will dislike him and disapprove.
Develop a more self-reliant attitude. Assume responsibility for your own life and emotional needs. Try giving affection, love, approval, acceptance, understanding, to other people, and you will find them coming back to you as a sort of reflex action.
(3) Relax away emotional Hurts
When we “feel hurt” or “feel offended”, the feeling is entirely a matter of our own response. In fact the feeling is our response.
It is our own responses that we have to be concerned about not other people’s we cam tighten up, become angry, anxious, or resentful and “feel hurt”. Or, we can make no response, remain relaxed and feel no hurt. Scientific experiments have shown that it is absolutely impossible of any kin while the muscles of the body are kept perfectly relaxed.
You alone are responsible for your responses and reactions. You do not have to respond at all. You can remain relaxed and free from injury.
True forgiveness comes only when we are able to see, and emotionally accept, that there is and was nothing for us to forgive. We should not have condemned or hated the other person in the first place.
To live creatively, we must be willing to be a little vulnerable. We must be willing to be hurt a little- if necessary, in creative living. A lot of people need a thicker and tougher emotional skin that they have. But they need only a though emotional hide or epidermis-nor a shell.
“Poor personality” and “inhibited personality” are one and the same. The person with a “poor personality” does not express the creative self within. He has restrained it, handcuffed it, locked it up ad thrown away the key. They word “inhibit” literally means to stop, prevent, prohibit, restrain.
The symptoms of inhibition are many and varied: shyness, timidity, self-consciousness, hostility, feelings of excessive guilt, insomnia, nervousness, irritability, inability to get along with others.
Inhibition and excessive negative feedback are one and the same. When we over-react to negative feedback of criticism, we are likely to conclude that not only is our present course slightly off-beam, or wrong, but that is wrong for us even to want to go forward.
If we are consciously overcritical of our speech, or if we are too careful in trying to avoid errors in advance, rather than reacting spontaneously, stuttering is likely to result.
Conscious Self-criticism makes you Do worse
When excessive negative feedback, or self-criticism was eliminated, inhibition disappeared and performance improved. When there was no time for worry, or too much carefulness in advance, expression immediately improved.
One ounce of good nervous tone in an examination, fling the book the day before, say to yourself, ‘I won´t waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I dont care an iota whether I succeed or not. Say this sincerely and feel it, and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the method permanently.
When you become too consciously concerned about “what others think”, when you become too careful to consciously try to please orther people; when you become too sensitive to the real or fancied disapproval of other people – then you have excessive negative feedback, inhibition and poor performance.
You become too careful to make a good impression, and in so doing choke off, restrain, inhibit your creative self and end up making a rather poor impression.
The way to make a good impression on other people is: Never consciously “try” to make a good impression on them. Never act, or fail to act purely for consciously contrived effect. Never “wonder” consciously what the other person is thinking of you, how he is judging you.
In this book, the knack of selling yourself, Mangan advises salesmen to use the “I’m going home to eat supper with my Ma and Pa! I’ve been through this a thousand times – nothing new can happen here, “attitude in all sorts of new and strange situations.
“This attitude of being immune to strangers or strange situations, this total disregard for all the unknown or unexpected has a name. It is called Poise, Poise is the deliberate shunting aside of all fears arising from new and uncontrollable circumstances.
You need to be more self-conscious
Then he stopped fighting and trying to conquer his “self-consciousness”, and instead concentrated or developing more self-consciousness feeling, acting, behaving, thinking as he did when he was alone, without any regard to how some other person might feel about of judge him. This total disregard for the opinion and judgement of other people did not result in his becoming callous, arrogant, or entirely insensitive to others. There is no danger of entirely insensitive to others. There is no danger of entirely eradicating negative feedback, no matter how hard you may try. But this effort in the opposite direction did tone down his overly sensitive feedback mechanism. He got along better with other people, and went on to make his living counseling people and making public speeches to large groups, ” without the slightest degree of self-consciousness”.
Many people, inhibited by the wrong kind of conscience, “hold back “, or ” take a back seat” in any kind of endeavor, even in church activities. They secretly feel it would not be “right” for them to “hold themselves out” as a leader, or “presume to be somebody”, or they are overly concerned with whether other people might think they were “showing off”.
We can become overly sensitive, and become too carefully concerned with whether we “have a right” to succeed in even a worthwhile endeavor.
Stage fright illustrates how universal is the suppression and inhibition of self-expression.
If you are among the millions who suffer unhappiness and failure because of inhibition- you need to deliberately practice dis-inhibition. You need to practice being less careful, less concerned, less conscientious. You need to practice speaking before you think instead of thinking before you speak. acting without thinking, instead of thinking or “considering carefully”before you act.
Practice Exercises:
1. Don’t wonder in advance what you “going to say”. Just open your mouth and say it. Improvise as you go along.
2. Don’t plan (take no thought for tomorrow) Don’t think before you act. Act- and correct your actions as you go along.
3. Stop criticizing yourself. The inhibited person indulges in self-critical analysis continually.
4, Make a habit of speaking louder than usual. Inhibited people are notoriously soft spoken. Raise the volume of your voice. You don’t have to shout at people and use an angry tone-just consciously practice speaking louder than usual loud talk in itself is a powerful dis inhibitor.
5. Let people know when you like them. The inhibited personality is as afraid of expressing “good” feelings as bad ones.
“counting to ten” when you are tempted to become angry is based upon the same principle, and is very good advice- if you count slowly, and in fact actually delay the response, rather than merely holding in your angry shouting or desk pounding.
We must be sensitive to negative feedback data which advises us when we are off course, so that we can change direction and go forward. But at the same time, we must keep our own ship afloat and stable. Our ship must not be tossed and rocked and perhaps sunk by every passing wave, or even a serious storm.
Stop scaring yourself to death with your own mental pictures. Stop fighting straw men emotionally, respond only to what actually is, here and now and ignore the rest.
In order to perform well in a crisis we need to (i) learn certain skills under conditions where we will not be demotivated, we need to practice without pressure (2) we need to learn to react to crisis with an aggressive rather than a defensive attitude; to respond to the challenge in the situation, rather than to the menace; to keep put positive goal in mind. (3) we need to learn to evaluate so-called “crisis” situations in their true perspective; to not make mountains out of molehills, or react as if every small challenge were a matter of life or death.
The more intense the crisis situation under which you learn, the less you learn.
The most common form of shadow-boxing for public speakers is to deliver their speech to their own image on the mirror.
If we dwell upon failure, and continually picture failure to ourselves in such vivid detail that it becomes “real” to our nervous system, we will experience the feelings that go with failure.
On the other hand, if we keep our positive goal in mind, and picture it to ourselves so vividly as to make it “real”, and think of it in terms of an accomplished fact, we will also experience “whining feelings”. Self-confidence, courage, and faith that the outcome will be desirable.
And if there is one simple secret to the operation of your unconscious creative mechanism, it is this: call up, capture, evoke the feeling of success. When you feel successful and self-confident, you will act successfully when the feeling is strong, you can literally do no wrong.
Use gradualness. Begin to think about the desired end result as you do when you do worry about the future. When you worry you do not attempt to convince yourself that the outcome will be undesirable.
Faith and courage are developed in exactly the same way. Only your goals are different. If you are going to spend time in worry, why not worry constructively? Begin by outlining and defining to yourself the most desirable possible outcome.
Feelings cannot be directly controlled by will power. They cannot be voluntarily made to order, or tuned on and off like a faucet. If they cannot be commanded, however, they can be wooed. If they cannot be controlled by a direct act of will, they can be controlled indirectly.
A “bad” feeling is not dispelled by conscious effort or “will power”. It can be dispelled, however, by another feeling. If we cannot drive out a negative feeling by making a frontal assault upon it, we can accomplish the same result by substituting a positive feeling. Remember that feeling follows imagery. Feeling coincides with, and is appropriate to, what our nervous system accepts as “real” or the “truth about environment”.
Whenever we find ourselves experiences undesirable feeling-tones, we should not concentrate upon the undesirable feeling, even to the extent of driving it out. Instead, we should immediately concentrate upon positive imagery – upon filling the mind with wholesome, positive, desirable images, imagination and memories.
We habitually indulge in negative imagire out of the past, and in anticipating the future. This worry creates tension. The worries the makes an “effort” to stop worrying and is caught in a vicious cycle. Tension provides a “worrying atmosphere”. The only cure for worry, he says, is to make a habit out of immediately substituting pleasant, wholesome, mental images, for unpleasant “worry images”. Each time the subject finds himself worrying, he is to use this as a “signal” to immediately fill the mind with pleasant mental pictures out of the past or in anticipating pleasant future experiences. In time worry will defeat itself because it becomes a stimulus for practicing anti worrying.
“Experience has taught me to regard pessimism as major symptom of early fossilization. It usually arrives with the first minor symptom of physical decline”.
Six basic need that every human being has:
1, The need for love.
2. The need for security.
3. The need for creative expression.
4. The need for recognition.
5., The need for new experiences.
6. The need for self-esteem
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