Everything that happens to you, everything you become and accomplish is determined by the way you think, by the way you use your mind. As you begin changing your mind, you begin changing your life. But how did you get to where you are today? What formative influences have combined to make you the person you are right now? Why do you think and feel the way you do, and what are the factors that have brought you to your current situation?
In this chapter, you will learn about your “master program” and how you have been put on a form of autopilot, starting from an early age. You will learn how to begin taking control of your internal guidance system, and how to remove influences and obstacles that have been interfering with your happiness without your even knowing about it. You will learn how to alter your master program to make it more consistent with the results you want.
When I was twenty, I was living in a small apartment with no job. It was the middle of winter and it was thirty-five degrees below zero. I was alone in a new city, thousands of miles from where I grew up.
Eleven years later, when I was thirty-one, I was again living alone in a small apartment. Again it was cold outside, thirty-five degrees below zero. I was deeply in debt, unemployed and a thousand miles from my family and friends.
After eleven years of working and traveling very little had changed. I was older and wiser but I still felt that I was spinning my wheels.
I felt frustrated. I felt that I was making very little progress. I had always harbored a secret belief that I had the potential to do more with my life, but I had no idea how to tap that potential.
I had heard that the average person uses only 10 percent or less of his or her potential in the course of a lifetime. Albert Einstein, one of the great geniuses of the twentieth century, was estimated to have only used about 15 percent of his.
Research at Stanford University concluded that the average person uses only about 2 percent of his or her mental abilities, based on studies of the neocortex, the “thinking brain” of the human being.
This subject fascinated me. What was the potential of the average person? What was my real potential? How could I get more out of myself? I was trying to open a combination lock without the right numbers. So I read and reflected, and I eventually discovered the answers, one by one. I learned the combination to the lock on the door of human potential. This combination enabled me to change my life, as it will enable you to change yours.
To begin with, in the entire history of the human race, there never has been, and never will be, anyone just like you. The odds that another person with your unique combination of characteristics and qualities will ever be born are more than 50 billion to one. You have the potential to do something special, even extraordinary, with your life, something that no one else can do. The only real question you have to answer is: Are you going to do it?
It’s true that some people are born with extraordinary gifts, but most of us start off with talents and abilities that are more or less average. Most men and women who achieve great success in any field do it by developing their natural talents and abilities to a very high degree in some special area of interest. Your individual potential is there, inside you, but it has to be identified and developed if you want to get more of what is really possible out of yourself.
One definition of individual potential is contained in the equation [IA + AA] x A = IHP. The first two letters, IA, stand for inborn attributes. These are what you are born with, your natural tendencies, your temperament, and your general mental ability.
The next two letters, AA, stand for acquired attributes. These are the knowledge, skill, talent, experience and ability that you have gained or developed as you have grown and matured.
The next letter, A, stands for attitude, or the kind of mental energy that you bring to bear on your combination of inborn and acquired attributes. IHP stands for individual human performance. So the formula is Inborn Attributes plus Acquired Attributes multiplied by your Attitude equals your Individual Human Performance.
Your inborn attributes, your natural talents and abilities, the “inner aspects” of your personality are largely fixed at birth. They are your genetic heritage. You can’t do much to change them.
Your acquired attributes are the skills and abilities you develop by channeling your natural talents through your education and experience. These are your areas of competence and potential mastery.
You can develop, improve and change your acquired attributes over time through study and practice, but the process is slow and deliberate, requiring patience, discipline and considerable effort.
The only wild card in the equation is A, or attitude. And here’s one of the insights that changed my life.
Since the quality of your attitude can be improved almost without limit, even a person with average inborn attributes and average acquired attributes can perform at a high level if he or she has a very positive mental attitude. And your attitude can be improved immediately and almost without limit. This is why it is your attitude as much as your aptitude that determines how much you accomplish. And your attitude is under the direct control of your will. You can decide what it is going to be every minute of every day.
Earl Nightingale referred to attitude as the most important word in the language. We know we should have a positive mental attitude. We’ve heard that for years. But what is that exactly?
Your attitude is the way you approach life. It is your “angle of attack.” It is your general mental tone and the outward expression of your thoughts and feelings. A positive mental attitude is a generally optimistic and cheerful way of greeting the people, problems and events that you encounter throughout your day.
Your attitude is one of the best indicators of the person you really are inside. And people reflect back to you your attitude toward them. This is why happy, cheerful people seem to get along well wherever they go.
Developing this kind of positive attitude toward yourself and your life is the first step to unlocking your full potential. And the only way you can tell what kind of attitude you really have is by observing how you react when things go wrong. As Epictetus wrote, “Circumstances do not make the man; they merely reveal him to himself.” You can tell best what you’re made of by watching the way you behave when you’re under pressure. Your real self comes out, for better or worse.
But where does your attitude come from? What causes one person to be positive and another to be negative? Your attitude is determined by your expectations. Your expectations about yourself and your life are very powerful. They exert an immense influence on your personality.
If you expect good things to happen to you, you’ll be positive and optimistic in your approach to people and situations. If you look for the good in others, you’ll probably find it. If you expect something wonderful to happen to you today, it probably will.
Positive expectations are the mark of the superior personality. They create in you an attitude of positive expectancy that goes hand in hand with happiness and self-confidence. They give you a form of mental resilience, a nonchalant optimism that enables you to respond constructively to the challenges you face every day. And as I said in Chapter Two, you can manufacture your own expectations by deciding to do so.
Where then do your expectations come from? Penetrating the layers of personality one by one is the only way to get right to the root cause of the way you think and feel. It is the only way to bring about rapid and permanent changes in your life and in your performance. Everything is from the inner to the outer. What you are doing and saying on the outside always has its roots in your inner life.
Your expectations are determined by your beliefs about yourself and the world you live in. Your expectations about people, work and every part of your life are generated by what you believe to be true in that area. Even if you have false or self-limiting beliefs, they will manifest themselves in your expectations, your attitudes and ultimately, in your results.
According to the law of belief, if you have a benevolent world view, if you believe that the world is a good place and that you are a good person, then you will expect the best from yourself, from others and from the situations you encounter. Your positive expectations will be expressed in a positive mental attitude and, by the Law of Correspondence, people will reflect back to you your attitude toward them. You will get back what you give out.
Your beliefs therefore determine the quality of your personality. And where do your beliefs come from? This brings us to perhaps the greatest breakthrough in psychology in the twentieth century—the discovery of the “self-concept.”
Your self-concept is your bundle of beliefs about yourself and about every part of your life and your world. It is the “master program” of your subconscious computer. The Law of Belief says that your beliefs determine your reality because you always see the world through a screen of prejudices formed by your belief structure. Your self-concept, your belief structure, precedes and predicts your performance and behavior in every area of your life. You always act in a manner consistent with your self-concept, consistent with the bundle of beliefs that you have acquired from infancy onward.
In other words, you are where you are and what you are because of what you believe yourself to be. Whether you are rich or poor, happy or unhappy, fat or thin, successful or unsuccessful, your beliefs make you this way.
If you change your beliefs in any area of your life, you begin immediately to change in that area. Your expectations, your attitudes, your behavior and your results all change.
Your outer world is an expression of your inner world, and cannot be otherwise. “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.”
Each of us has been programmed to walk, talk, think and act the way we do today. You cannot think, feel or behave any differently on the outside unless you change your master program, your self-concept, on the inside. A negative or erroneous idea in your self-concept will be expressed in negative attitudes and behavior in your life and relationships.
But you can change your program, your self-concept, by replacing self-limiting ideas and beliefs with self-liberating thoughts. You can begin to think of yourself as you want to be rather than as you are. You can decide to make every part of your life positive, exciting and uplifting. You can create your life as a masterpiece. And when you do, these new constructive thoughts begin immediately to clothe themselves in their physical realities.
There is a direct relationship between how well you do anything and your self-concept in that area. You perform as well as you believe yourself capable of performing. You are as effective as you believe yourself to be in whatever you do. You can never be better or different on the outside than you believe yourself to be on the inside.
Whenever you feel good about yourself and are doing well at your job, or in your relationships, or at a sport, you are demonstrating a positive self-concept in that area. Whenever you do poorly or feel inferior or clumsy, or behave badly in some situation, your negative beliefs about yourself are being demonstrated in your behavior. As within, so without.
What makes positive change possible for you is that your self-concept is largely subjective, not objective. Your beliefs about yourself, especially your self-limiting beliefs and doubts, are not based on fact at all. Negative ideas about yourself and your abilities are usually based on false information and impressions you have taken in and accepted as true.
As soon as you begin to reject these self-limiting ideas, they begin to lose their power over you. By deliberately changing your self-concept, your true potential becomes unlimited.
A young man, about twenty-five, who came to my seminar was working as a construction laborer. During our discussion of the influence of the self-concept, he had a mental shock. The lights went on for him. He was stunned.
He told me that his father, an uneducated working man, had told his children continually, “Our family has always been laborers and we always will be. It’s our lot in life. That’s just the way it is.” As he grew up hearing this, he accepted it as a fact, a belief, and when he left school, he went to work as a laborer.
In the seminar, he suddenly realized that he had bought his father’s limited outlook on life without question. He had swallowed his father’s belief system whole. He looked at himself and the world the way his father had.
Now, seven years later, he was still “working by the sweat of his brow.” He had inadvertently allowed his father to shape his self-concept with regard to his work and his possibilities. He saw how his beliefs about himself had shaped his expectations and his attitude. He realized that he had continually attracted only laboring opportunities and that his outer world, his relationships and his lifestyle had all been determined by his beliefs.
He decided at that moment that he didn’t like being a laborer. He had always felt he could do much more, but he had also felt trapped. Now, he experienced a new sense of freedom and control. He realized for the first time that his limitations were on the inside, not on the outside.
After the seminar, he quit his laboring job and got into sales, starting at the bottom. He did poorly at first, but he was determined. He read every book he could find on selling. He listened to every audiocassette program. He attended every sales seminar available in his area and he even traveled to seminars in other cities.
We kept in touch. Within one year, he had doubled his income. In two years, he was making four times as much. He went to the top of his sales force and was soon hired away for more money and greater opportunity.
Within five years he was making more than one hundred thousand dollars per year, had a beautiful home, a lovely wife, two children and an exciting future lying before him. He was the master of his own destiny.
The turning point for him, as it was for me and thousands of others, was learning how his self-concept controlled his life and then deciding to change it. Everything followed from that.
Not only do you have an overall self-concept, which is a general summary of your beliefs about yourself, but you also have a series of “mini-self-concepts.” These parts of your self-concept control your performance and your behavior in each individual area of your life that you consider important.
You have a self-concept for how much you weigh, for how much you eat, for how much you exercise or for how fit you are. You have a self-concept for how you dress and how you appear to other people. You have a self-concept of yourself as a parent, and as a child to your parents. You have a self-concept for how popular you are, at work and among your friends.
You have a self-concept for how well you play each sport and even for how well you play each part of each sport. A golfer may have one self-concept as a great driver and another self-concept as a poor putter, and that’s the way he or she will play.
If you are in sales, you have an overall self-concept for how good you are as a salesperson, which determines how well you do in sales. You also have individual self-concepts for how good you are at prospecting, identifying needs, presenting solutions, answering objections and closing. In each of these areas, you will be relaxed and competent, or tense and unsure, depending upon how you think of yourself performing those tasks.
You have a self-concept for how well-organized and efficient you are, in both your personal and your work life. And you will always behave in a manner consistent with your self-concept. You cannot behave in a way that is different from your subconscious programming any more than a computer could decide to disregard its programming.
You have an overall self-concept for how competent you are in your field and for how much money you are capable of earning. You can never rise much higher than your self-concept level of ability or earn much more or less than your self-concept level of income.
In fact, if you earn more than 10 percent above or below what you feel you are worth, you will feel very uncomfortable. You will immediately begin engaging in compensatory behavior. If you earn 10 percent too much, you will begin to spend the money, lend it, invest it in things you know nothing about or even give it away or lose it. Such “throw-away” behavior is practiced by anyone who suddenly finds himself or herself with more money than is consistent with his or her self-concept.
There are many stories of men and women who have won large sums of money in various lotteries. In most cases, if they were working at laboring jobs when they won the money, in two or three years they were back working at the same jobs, their money was gone, and they had no idea where it went.
If you earn 10 percent or more below your self-concept level of income, you begin to engage in “scrambling” behavior. You begin to think more creatively, work longer and harder, look at second-income opportunities or think about changing jobs in order to get your income back up into your self-concept range.
Where money, weight or anything else is concerned, you gradually get into your various “comfort zones,” and once there, you do everything possible to stay there. You resist change of any kind, even positive change.
The comfort zone is the great enemy of human potential. Your comfort zones become habits of living that are hard to break. And any habit persisted in over time eventually becomes a rut. Then, instead of using your intelligence to get out of your rut, you use most of your energies making your rut more comfortable. You justify and rationalize your situation as being unchangeable. You feel and say, “There’s nothing I can do.”
But there is a lot you can do to change your future. In the pages to come, you will learn how to break out of your comfort zones. You will learn how to step up to the keyboard of your own mental computer and input a new belief system for yourself. You will learn how to redesign your self-concept so you can get more of whatever you really want in life.
Your self-concept is made up of three parts, like three layers of a cake. The first of these three parts is your self-ideal. This is the vision or ideal description of the person that you would most like to be in every respect. This ideal image exerts a powerful influence on your behavior and on the way you think about yourself.
Your self-ideal is a combination of the qualities and attributes that you admire most in other people, living and dead. It is the sum of your dominant aspirations. It is your vision of what the perfect person should be.
Exceptional men and women have very clear self-ideals, toward which they are constantly striving. They set high standards for themselves and strive to live up to them. And so can you. The more clear you are about the person you want to become, the more likely it is that, day by day, you will evolve into that person. You will rise to the height of your dominant aspirations for yourself. You will become what you most admire.
Sadly, unsuccessful and unhappy men and women have very fuzzy ideals, or in most cases, no self-ideals at all. They give little or no thought to the person they want to be or to the qualities that they would like to develop in themselves. Their growth and evolution eventually slows and stops. They get stuck in a mental rut and they stay there. They lose all impetus for self-improvement.
When one looks up to, and respects, the qualities of integrity, purposefulness, courage and action orientation in others, one begins to incorporate those values in oneself.
As you clarify your fundamental values and work to integrate them into everything you do, your personality improves, and because your outer life reflects your inner life, your work, your relationships and every aspect of your outer life improves as well. More about this later.
The second part of your self-concept is your self-image. Your self-image is the way you see yourself, and the way you think about yourself, as you go about your daily activities. Your self-image is often called your “inner mirror,” into which you look to see how you are supposed to behave or perform in a particular situation. You always behave consistently with the picture that you hold of yourself on the inside. Because of this, you can improve your performance by deliberately changing the mental pictures that you hold about yourself in that area.
This process of self-image modification is one of the fastest and most dependable ways to improve your performance. As you begin to see yourself and think about yourself as more competent and confident, your behavior becomes more focused and effective.
When you deliberately change your self-image, as you’ll learn to do later in this chapter, you’ll walk, talk, act and feel better than you ever have before. You will change both your personality and your results by changing your mental images.
The third part of your self-concept is your self-esteem. Your self-esteem is how you feel about yourself. It is the emotional component of your personality, and it is the foundation quality of high performance. It is the key to happiness and personal effectiveness. It is like the reactor core in a nuclear power plant. It is the source of the energy, enthusiasm, vitality and optimism that powers your personality and makes you into a high-achieving man or woman.
Your level of self-esteem is determined by two factors, which are like the opposite sides of the same coin. The first is how valuable and worthwhile you feel about yourself, how much you like and accept yourself as a good person. This is the “personal assessment” side of self-esteem. This is your rating of yourself, aside from what is going on in your life at the moment.
This first factor is not dependent upon external variables. A person with genuinely high self-esteem can have innumerable difficulties and setbacks in life and still retain a high, positive estimate of himself or herself as a human being. Unfortunately, there are very few people who have reached this state of evolution where they can retain a sense of inner value independent of external circumstances.
The second factor determining your level of self-esteem is your feeling of “self-efficacy,” how competent and capable you feel you are in whatever you do. This is the “performance-based” side of self-esteem. It is the bedrock upon which most real and lasting self-confidence and self-respect are built.
These two parts of your self-esteem reinforce each other. When you feel good about yourself, you perform better. And when you perform well, you feel good about yourself. Both are essential. Neither can endure without the other.
The best measure of self-esteem is how much you like yourself. The more you like yourself, the better you do at everything you put your mind to. The more you like yourself, the more confidence you have, the more positive is your attitude, the healthier and more energetic you are and the happier you are overall.
And since how you feel is largely determined by how you talk to yourself, silently or aloud, you can raise your self-esteem at will by saying, over and over, with enthusiasm and conviction, the words “I like myself! I like myself! I like myself!”
Or, better yet, you can say “I love myself! I love myself! I love myself!” This may sound corny when you first hear it, but it is extremely powerful. As an experiment, look up from this page and say to yourself, as if you meant it from the bottom of your heart, “I like myself!” several times. Better yet, look in the next mirror you pass and say “I like myself.” You’ll find that you can’t say this five or six times without feeling genuinely better about yourself.
We have taught this to our children. Whenever they are unhappy or misbehaving, we coax them into saying, “I like myself,” and they soon break out in smiles and cheer up. It seems that the more open and receptive a person is to this message, the greater the impact it has on his or her personality.
Liking yourself is very healthy. In fact, it is the key to personal effectiveness and to happy relationships with others. The more you like and respect yourself, the better you perform in everything you do. You are more relaxed and positive. You are more confident about your abilities. You make fewer mistakes. You have more energy and you are more creative.
Some people have been taught to believe that liking yourself is the same as being conceited or obnoxious. But exactly the opposite is true. Both the “superiority complex,” behaving in an arrogant or conceited way, and the “inferiority complex,” behaving in a self-deprecating way, are manifestations of low self-esteem, of not liking oneself very much at all. People with genuine self-esteem get along easily and well with just about everyone.
There are two rules of self-esteem and self-liking: Rule number one is that you can never like or love anyone else more than you like or love yourself. You can’t give away what you don’t have.
Rule number two is that you can never expect anyone else to like or love you more than you like, love or respect yourself.
Your own level of self-liking and self-acceptance is the control valve on the quality of your human relationships. It is the problem or the solution in every human situation. Everything you do to build and reinforce your own self-esteem increases the amount of satisfaction and happiness you enjoy with the other people in your life.
If your self-concept is the master program of your subconscious computer, where does it come from? How is it formed? What is it composed of? And most important, how can you reprogram it to improve yourself and increase your effectiveness in everything you do?
You were not born with a self-concept. Everything that you know and believe about yourself today, you have learned as the result of what has happened to you since you were an infant. Each child comes into the world as pure potential, with a particular temperament and certain inborn attributes but with no self-concept at all. Every attitude, behavior, value, opinion, belief and fear you have today has been learned. Therefore, if there are elements of your self-concept that do not serve your purposes, you can unlearn them.
For example, I read recently about a thirty-two-year-old woman who was involved in an automobile accident. As a result of hitting her head, she experienced total amnesia. At the time of the accident, she was married, with two children, eight and ten years old. She was extremely shy, she had a stutter and she was very nervous around other people. She had a poor self-concept and a low level of self-esteem. To compound this problem, she did not work and she had a limited social circle.
Because of her total amnesia, when she woke up in the hospital she did not remember a single thing about her past life. She did not remember her parents, and she did not remember her husband and her children. Her mind was a complete blank.
This was so unusual that various specialists, neurosurgeons and psychologists were brought in to talk to her and to examine her.
She was such a special case that she became very well known. When she recovered physically, she was interviewed on radio and television. She began studying her condition, and eventually she wrote articles and a book describing her experience.
She began traveling and giving lectures to medical and professional groups. Ultimately she became a recognized authority on amnesia.
With no memory of her previous experiences, her childhood and her upbringing, and as a result of being the center of attention and being treated as though she were a very important person, she developed a totally new personality. She became positive, selfconfident and outgoing. She became gregarious and extremely friendly, and she developed an excellent sense of humor. She became popular and met and moved in an entirely new social circle. In effect, she developed a brand-new self-concept that was completely consistent with high performance, happiness and life satisfaction. She substituted one mental program for another. And you can do the same thing.
Once you understand how your self-concept was formed, you will be able to bring about changes that make you into the kind of person you admire and want to be like. You will learn how to become the kind of person who can accomplish the goals and dreams that are most important to you.
Children come into the world with no self-concept. Children learn who they are, and how important and valuable they are (or aren’t) by the way they are treated from infancy onward. Infants have a tremendous need for love and touching. The love in their environment is like their emotional oxygen. You cannot give children too much love and affection in their formative years. Children need love like roses need rain, almost as much as they need food and drink and shelter for healthy growth.
The foundation of personality is laid down in the first three to five years of life. The healthiness of the adult will be largely determined by the quality and quantity of unbroken love and affection that the child receives from parents and others during this time.
A child who is raised with an abundance of love, affection and encouragement will tend to develop a positive and stable personality early in life. A child who is raised with criticism and punishment will tend to grow up fearful, suspicious, and distrustful, with the potential for a variety of personality problems that manifest themselves later in life. Adults with low self-esteem and negative mental attitudes were invariably children who were deprived of the love and security they needed during their formative years.
Children are born with two remarkable qualities. The first is that they are born largely unafraid. They come into the world with only two physical fears, the fear of loud noises and the fear of falling. All other fears have to be taught to the child through repetition and reinforcement while the child is growing up.
Anyone who has ever tried to raise a small child to the age of five or six knows that they are not afraid of anything. They will climb up on ladders, run out into traffic, grab sharp instruments, and generally do things that appear suicidal to an adult. They have no fears at all until those fears are instilled in them by their parents and others.
The second remarkable quality of children is that they are completely uninhibited. They laugh, they cry, they wet their pants. They say and do exactly what they feel like with no concern whatever for the opinions of others. They are completely spontaneous and express themselves easily and naturally with no inhibitions at all. Have you ever seen a self-conscious baby?
Wonderfully enough, this is your natural state, the way you come into the world, unafraid and uninhibited, completely fearless and able to express yourself freely and easily in all situations. You know this is true because, years later, whenever you are in a safe situation, with people you trust, you often revert to this natural state of fearlessness and spontaneity. You feel relaxed and comfortable, completely free to let your hair down and be yourself. These are some of the best moments of your life, your peak experiences, when you are truly happy. And they are your normal, natural condition.
Children learn in two primary ways. First, they learn by imitation of one or both parents. Many of your adult habit patterns, including your values, your attitudes, your beliefs and your behaviors, were formed by watching and by listening to your parents when you were growing up. The sayings “Like father, like son” or “Like mother, like daughter” are certainly true. Often the child will identify strongly with one parent and will be more influenced by that parent than by the other.
The second way children learn is by moving away from discomfort toward comfort, or away from pain toward pleasure. Sigmund Freud called this the “pleasure principle.” His conclusion, and that of most psychologists, is that this striving toward pleasure or happiness is the basic motivation for all human behavior. The child’s development, from toilet training to eating habits, to every aspect of his or her socialization, is shaped by this continual drive or motivation toward comfort or personal pleasure, toward what feels good and away from what feels bad.
Of all the discomforts that a child can suffer, the withdrawal of the love and approval of the parent is the most traumatic and frightening. Children have an intense need for emotional security, for their parents’ love, support and protection. When the parent withdraws his or her love in an attempt to discipline, control or punish the child, the child becomes extremely uncomfortable and insecure. The child becomes afraid.
The perception of the child is everything. It is not what the parents meant or intended that counts, it is what the child perceives that affects the child’s feelings and actions. When the child perceives that love has been withdrawn, the child immediately changes his or her behavior in an attempt to win back the parent’s love and approval. The child feels like a drowning person reaching for a life preserver.
Without a continuous and unbroken flow of unconditional love, the child’s security is threatened. Frustrated, the child loses his or her fearlessness and spontaneity.
Most personality problems in life are the result of “love withheld.” Probably much of what we do in life, from childhood onward, is done either to get love or to compensate for the lack of love. Most of our unhappy memories of childhood are associated with a perceived lack of love. Most of our problems in adult relationships are rooted in these earlier experiences of love deprivation.
At an early age, as a result of mistakes parents make in raising their children, especially when they use destructive criticism and physical punishment, the child begins to lose his or her natural fearlessness and spontaneity. He or she begins to develop negative habit patterns, negative ways of reacting to life. All habits, positive or negative, are conditioned responses to stimuli. They are learned as the result of repetition, over and over, until they are firmly ingrained in the subconscious mind. Then they function automatically, whenever they’re triggered by some stimulus.
Negative habits become customary behavior, parts of our self-concept. They become our comfort zones. Once they are programmed in and become part of our psychological makeup, we only feel comfortable when we’re behaving or reacting in a particular negative way. We become fear-driven rather than desire-driven.
Destructive criticism is one of the most harmful of all human behavior. It lowers self-esteem, creates poor self-image, and undermines the individual’s performance in everything he or she attempts. Destructive criticism shakes the individual’s self-confidence so that he or she feels inferior, tenses up and makes mistakes whenever he or she attempts anything for which he or she has been criticized in the past. The individual may give up trying at all and simply avoid the area of endeavor altogether.
The average parent criticizes his or her children as many as eight times for every time he or she praises them. Parents criticize their children unthinkingly in an attempt to get them to improve their behavior. But exactly the opposite occurs. Because destructive criticism undermines the child’s self-esteem and weakens his or her self-concept, effectiveness decreases rather than increases. The child’s performance gets worse, not better.
Destructive criticism makes the individual feel incompetent and inadequate. He or she feels angry and defensive and wants to strike back or escape. Performance nosedives. All sorts of negative consequences occur. Especially, the relationship between the parent and child deteriorates.
Children who are criticized for their schoolwork soon develop a negative association between schoolwork and how they feel about themselves. They begin to hate it and avoid it whenever possible. They see schoolwork as a source of pain and frustration. And because of the Laws of Attraction and Correspondence, they begin to associate with other children with the same attitudes.
Often people make the mistake of thinking they are giving “constructive criticism” when they are really just tearing the other person down—and calling it “constructive” to rationalize their behavior. True constructive criticism leaves the person feeling better and more capable of doing a better job in the future. If criticism doesn’t improve performance, by increasing the individual’s feelings of self-esteem and self-efficacy, then it has merely been a destructive act of self-expression carried out against someone who is not in a position to resist.
Destructive criticism lies at the root of many personality problems and of much hostility between individuals. It leaves a trail of broken spirits, demoralization, anger, resentment, self-doubt and a host of negative emotions.
When children are criticized at an early age, they soon learn to criticize themselves. They run themselves down, sell themselves short and interpret their experiences in a negative way. They continually feel, “I’m not good enough,” no matter how hard they work or how well they do.
The whole purpose of criticism, if you must give it, is “performance improvement.” It is to help the other person to be better as a result. Constructive criticism is not done for revenge. It is not a vehicle to express your displeasure or anger. Its purpose is to help, not hurt, or you should refrain from using it at all.
Here are seven steps you can follow to ensure that what you are giving is “constructive feedback” rather than destructive criticism.
First, protect the individual’s self-esteem at all costs. Treat it like a balloon, with your words as potential needles. Be gentle. With my children, I always begin the process of correction with the words “I love you very much,” and then I go on to give them the feedback and guidance they require to be better.
Second, focus on the future, not the past. Don’t cry over spilled milk. Talk about “What do we do from here?” Use words like “Next time, why don’t you . . .”
Third, focus on the behavior or the performance, not the person. Replace the word “you” with a description of the problem.
Instead of saying, “You are not selling enough,” instead say, “Your sales figures are below what we expect. What can we do to get them up?”
Fourth, use “I” messages to retain ownership of your feelings. Instead of saying, “You make me very angry,” instead say, “I feel very angry when you do that,” or, “I am not happy about this situation and I would like to discuss how we could change it.”
Fifth, get clear agreement on what is to change, and when, and by how much. Be specific as well as future-oriented and solution-oriented. Say things like, “In the future, it’s important that you keep accurate notes and double check before you make shipments final.”
Sixth, offer to help. Ask, “What can I do to help you in this situation?” Be prepared to show the person what to do and how to do it. As a parent, or if you are in a position of authority, one of your key jobs is to be a teacher. You can’t expect another to do something different without instructing that person how it is to be done.
Seventh, assume that the other person wants to do a good job and that, if he or she has done a poor job or made a mistake, it was not deliberate. The problem is limited skill, incomplete information or a misunderstanding of some kind.
Be calm, patient, supportive, sensitive, clear and constructive rather than angry or destructive. Build the person up rather than tearing him or her down. There’s probably no faster way for you to build self-esteem and self-efficacy in others than by immediately ceasing all destructive criticism. You will notice the difference at once in all your relationships.
There are two major negative habit patterns that we all learn in childhood. There are those that push you forward and those that hold you back. They affect everything you think, feel and do. They control and determine your destiny in life, and you are only vaguely aware of them. They are called the inhibitive and the compulsive. Understanding their impact in your life and learning how to counteract their influence on your behavior is absolutely indispensable to your achieving the kind of success and happiness that is possible for you.
The inhibitive negative habit pattern is learned when the child is told over and over again, “Don’t! Get away from that! Stop that! Don’t touch! Watch out!” The child’s natural impulse is to touch, taste, smell, feel and explore every part of his or her world. When the parents react to the child’s exploratory behavior by shouting, by becoming upset, by spanking the child or with some other form of disapproval, the child is not old enough to understand what is going on. Instead, the child internalizes the message that “every time I try something new or different, Mommy or Daddy gets mad at me and stops loving me. It must be because I’m too small, I’m incompetent, I’m incapable, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”
This feeling that “I can’t” soon crystallizes into the “fear of failure.” And the fear of failure is the greatest single obstacle to success in adult life. The fear of failure wells up inside you whenever you think of taking any kind of risk, or doing anything new or different involving any risk of loss of time, money or emotion.
In my own case, because I had done poorly in school, I feared that I wasn’t smart enough to do much better than I was doing. When I saw other people around me wheeling and dealing and taking risks and getting into and out of jobs and business deals, I just looked away. I assumed they had attributes of intelligence and daring that I lacked.
When I was a child, because I had been brought up to fear whippings from my father, I was afraid of bullies on the playground. When I got into selling, I was afraid of cold calls. When I got into management, I was afraid of asserting myself. When I made a little money, I was afraid of investing, and when I had the chance, I was afraid of starting my own business, for fear I would fail and lose my investment.
My parents had been fearful and they brought me up fearful. They did a good job. It was only later when I learned that my fears were all in my mind, that there was nothing to be afraid of, that my real life began.
You experience all negative habit patterns in your body. When you are in the grip of a negative habit pattern, you feel and react exactly as if you were in danger of physical harm. And the place you feel the inhibitive negative habit pattern, the fear of failure, is down the front of your body, starting in your solar plexus and spreading from there.
If, for example, you were afraid of public speaking, and you were told that you were going to be called up in front of a large audience, your first reaction would be a feeling of weakness, of fright in your solar plexus, the emotional center of your body. And the more you thought about the upcoming event, the more the fear would spread. Your heart would start beating faster. You would begin breathing more rapidly and with shallower breaths.
Your throat might go dry, and you might get a pounding in the front part of your head, similar to a migraine headache. Your bladder might also fill up, and you would have an irresistible urge to run to the bathroom. You would react as if you were about to get a spanking. All these physical manifestations of the inhibitive negative habit pattern are usually programmed into your subconscious mind before you are six years old.
Negative habit patterns also trigger feelings of anxiety and nervousness, accompanied by perspiration, rapid heartbeat and emotional responses such as irritation, impatience and angry outbursts. The more deeply entrenched the negative habit pattern, the more extreme will be your reaction to the situation.
You learn the fear of failure, of inhibition, characterized by the words, “I can’t,” in three different ways.
First, you learn it by repeated association with a particular event, coupled with destructive criticism or physical punishment. If a child is spanked every time he or she touches the piano, he or she will eventually develop a conditioned response of fear that can be triggered by the very thought of playing a piano.
A doctor in my seminar told me how he was beaten by an alcoholic father when he was a child. The father would jump up from his chair without warning and hit the boy. Now, fifty years later, if the doctor even sees someone on television jump up quickly, his whole body reacts exactly as if he’s about to be attacked. His solar plexus tightens up. His heart rate jumps. He begins to perspire. He shakes all over. This is a conditioned response caused by childhood trauma, and he will probably never get over it.
Second, you can learn a negative habit pattern as the result of subtle negative influences that you may not be aware of. Some people accept criticism of themselves unquestioningly as if they were actually true. Others believe the negative qualities described in their horoscopes. Some people do things poorly the first time and conclude they have no aptitude in that area.
The important thing for you to do is to continually ask yourself, “What if I had the capacity to be really good in that area?” Then, assume that you do have the inherent ability and go to work on yourself. When you begin casting off the bonds of your self-limiting beliefs and fears, you’ll find that there are very few obstacles in front of you. They’re almost all in your mind, in your automatic responses.
The third way you can learn a negative habit pattern or fearful response is as the result of a single traumatic event of some kind.
One particularly frightening experience, such as almost drowning or falling as a child, can give you an “irrational” fear of water or heights for life. The very thought of doing that particular thing triggers in you a form of paralysis.
Sometimes these fears are called phobias, and they can be progressive. One negative experience, continually dwelled upon and relived, can become a major fear that affects much of your life and seriously interferes with your happiness.
The key word here is “irrational.” The situation triggers feelings of extreme anxiety and you become angry about it—but you don’t know why. The very thought of it upsets you and interferes with your work or your relationships.
One of your requirements for becoming a positive person is to clear your mental decks, to blow out your subconscious tubes, and this requires that you identify and deal with any fears that could be holding you back.
Talk out your fears with a good friend or spouse. Others often can see things that you can’t. Consult a psychologist or psychiatrist if necessary. A professional therapist can often help you to free yourself of mental obstacles that have been blocking your progress for years.
The second major type of negative habit pattern that children learn is the compulsive. The compulsive negative habit pattern is learned by the child when he or she is told over and over again, “You’d better, or else.” Parents say, “If you don’t do, or stop doing, something or other, you are in big trouble.” To the child, trouble with parents always means the withdrawal of love and approval.
When parents make their love conditional upon the child’s performance or behavior, the child soon internalizes the message that “I am not loved and therefore I am not safe until and unless I do what pleases my mommy and daddy. Therefore, I have to do what pleases them. I have to do what makes them happy. I have to do what they want. I have to, I have to, I have to.”
This compulsive negative habit pattern develops when parents make their love conditional rather than unconditional. It manifests itself in the fear of rejection. And the fear of rejection is the second major reason for failure and underachievement in adult life.
If you were raised with conditional love, you can tell because of the way you feel as an adult. You will be overly concerned, if not obsessed, with the opinions of others, especially with the opinions of your parents, spouse, boss or friends.
The word is “overly.” It’s normal and natural to be considerate of the thoughts and feelings of others. It is this concern for and respect for people’s opinions that serves as the glue that holds society together. Otherwise, we would have chaos.
But carried to an extreme, like all fears, it can be paralyzing. It can reach the point where people are incapable of making a decision for themselves until they have received approval from someone else.
We need and strive for the respect of other people, but superior people, self-actualizing men and women, have sufficient confidence in themselves to consider the opinions of others and then make their own decisions based on what they feel is right for them.
Remember, we’re all afraid. Especially, we fear criticism and disapproval. We will go to great lengths to earn the goodwill and acceptance of people we look up to. We will make sacrifices of all kinds to be liked. Soldiers will even risk their lives not to let others down.
But you need to be constantly aware of this insidious influence. It can, as Francis Bacon wrote, “make a man who can in no way be true to his own ends.”
In each situation in which the opinions of others are involved, ask yourself, “What do I really want to do? What would make me the happiest?” Then make your decisions for the person who is going to have to live with them—yourself.
The compulsive negative habit pattern is experienced physically in the form of tension in the neck and shoulders and pain in the lower back. It is usually manifested whenever you feel overloaded, “under the gun,” or when you have too much to do and too little time. These physical pains are a major result of stress and overwork. They can lead to serious psychosomatic illnesses.
Women tend to manifest the fear of rejection in depression, withdrawal and physical symptoms. Men tend to manifest this compulsive negative habit pattern in what is called “Type A behavior.” This behavior usually stems from the relationship between the father and the son, or the father and the daughter. It is caused by the feeling of the child that he or she never got the proper quality and quantity of love from his or her father.
For men, this unconscious striving for love from their fathers is transferred, in adult life, to the boss in the workplace. Type A behavior is then manifested as an over-concern for the approval of the boss. In extreme cases, this can cause a man to become obsessive about his work, even to the point of ruining his health and his family.
I remember when my father died, I took it very badly. I felt that I had never been able to get it right—that I had never done the things necessary to get his complete love and acceptance. Two years after his death, I still felt a great sense of loss and emptiness whenever I thought about him.
Then, one evening, I took my mother out to dinner and shared my feelings with her. She was surprised and told me that I had no reason to be sad or upset. She explained that my father had never had very much love to give to anyone.
Because of his childhood and early experiences, he had very little love for himself, and therefore very little for his children, including me. She told me that there was nothing that I could have done to get more love than I got.
Over time, I have found that most men who suffer from Type A behavior are still trying to earn the love and respect of their fathers. But what I learned after my father died was that, whatever love you get, or got, from your father, that was all he had to give. There is nothing that you could have done, and nothing that you can do now, to change it. Once you understand and accept that, you can relax a little and then get on with the rest of your life.
Every group of people, from a couple to a large organization, forms a self-concept. It is the overall personality of the people when they’re together, or when they think of themselves as part of a larger whole. It can be called morale, or the culture, but it is much more. It is the general psychological tone of the organization. Above all, it is how happy the individuals are as part of the larger group. It is how proud and confident they feel, or don’t feel, in their membership in the greater entity.
Each couple has a self-concept. It is the way they see themselves and feel about themselves when they are together. It’s expressed in the amount they laugh together, or don’t laugh. Couples and families with positive self-concepts are happy and enthusiastic about each other and about being together. Couples and families with negative self-concepts are characterized by constant complaining, criticizing and arguing.
Corporations have self-concepts as well, as does each division, department, or human grouping within the corporation, right down to the personality of the clean-up crew that comes in after hours.
The self-concept of a business is made up of three basic ingredients. The first, the self-ideal, is a combination of the vision, values, ethics and mission of the organization. Wherever these are clear and positive and committed to by top management, the people in the company are happier, more positive and more confident about themselves and where they’re going.
One of the most profound and unavoidable responsibilities of management (or parents) is to clearly articulate this self-ideal, and then to embody their values in their behavior toward others, to repeatedly tell others what they stand for and believe in and then lead by example.
The second ingredient of the company’s self-concept is the collective self-image. This is the way the company’s management and employees see themselves and think about themselves. This self-image is largely determined by how well they feel they are doing their job, performing their functions. It is especially affected by the quality of their products and services, and by the way they feel they are perceived in the marketplace by their customers and suppliers.
When I work with companies whose sales are up, whose market share is growing and whose profits are respectable, everyone seems happy, outgoing and confident. When I deal with companies that are struggling, in the marketplace or for internal reasons, the employees are often like members of a team that is losing too many games. They are unhappy, unsure and negative about their prospects. They take it out on each other by criticizing, complaining and backbiting.
One of the jobs of the executive or team leader is to keep people’s spirits up by continually telling them how good they are. Everyone looks upward for guidance on how to interpret what’s happening. The executive’s job is to keep morale high by putting the best possible spin on events and by keeping people focused on the possibilities of the future, rather than the problems of the past.
The final ingredient of the organization’s self-concept, self-esteem, is the sum total of the ideals of the corporation, the current performance of the organization and how well each person feels he or she is being treated by superiors and coworkers. Managers who continually praise and encourage their people build high self-esteem in them. This high self-esteem is demonstrated in optimism, energy, creativity, cooperation and commitment. It is the hardest ingredient of all to build and maintain, but people who like and respect themselves as part of a first-class team become a powerful force in a competitive marketplace. They become a victory just looking for a place to happen.
A company, organization, department, division, work team or family with a positive self-concept is one in which people feel terrific about themselves. Creating such a group is the highest art of management. It is the supreme skill of the individual in society. With a high, positive self-concept people are more productive, more resilient, more confident and happier than they could ever be without it.
With this kind of team or family, you can do wonderful things. You can fulfill your potential as you help others to fulfill theirs.
The greatest problem of human life is fear. It is fear that robs us of happiness. It is fear that causes us to settle for far less than we are capable of. It is fear that is the root cause of negative emotions, unhappiness and problems in human relationships.
The only good thing about fear, if there is anything good, is that it is learned, and because of this, it can be unlearned.
The fear of failure and the fear of rejection are learned responses, programmed into you before the age of six. These fears usually set the upper and lower limits of your comfort zone. Because of them, you do enough not to be criticized or rejected on the low side, and you stay well within your limits so you can avoid risk or failure on the high side. Once you’ve slipped into your comfort zone, you stay there, attempting to avoid any feeling of fear or anxiety. Your fears hold you back from most of what is possible for you.
The opposite of fear is love, starting with self-love, or self-esteem. There is an inverse or opposite relationship between self-esteem and fears of all kinds. The more you like yourself, the less you fear failure and rejection. The more you like yourself, the more willing you are to reach out and take the risks that will lead you on to success and happiness. The more you like yourself, the more willing you are to take the actions that propel you out of your comfort zone and toward the achievement of your real goals and desires.
You begin the process of raising your self-esteem and overriding your fears by repeating the powerful words, “I like myself! I like myself! I like myself!” over and over.
Start off each day by repeating “I like myself” fifty or one hundred times until the words penetrate your subconscious mind. You will soon see and feel the difference in your self-confidence, your competence and your relationships with others. You will start to feel wonderful about yourself.
Because of your self-concept, you become what you think about most of the time. Your dominant thoughts and aspirations become your reality. The things you think about, and the way you think about them, determine your levels of health, wealth and happiness in every area of your life. You can tell how much you really want anything by how willing you are to discipline your thinking in such a way that you keep your mind on only the things you want, and off of the things you don’t want.
You have created your life today by all of your previous thinking. You are where you are and what you are because of yourself. You can change your future at any time by taking control of your conscious mind from this point forward. You can make your life into something wonderful—an experience of freedom, joy, health, happiness and prosperity—simply by deciding to do so, and by refusing to entertain any contradictory thoughts at the same time. It’s up to you.
Because of the nature of your multidimensional mind, you can rewrite your master program by deliberately bombarding your mind with a series of messages, framed in different ways and coming from several directions. If you wanted to become physically fit, you would do exercises that engaged your whole body. If you want to become mentally fit, positive and healthy, you ensure that the messages coming into your conscious mind are consistent with the ideal life you want to live.
This change in the person you are, so you can enjoy the life you really want, is not easy. It has taken you your whole life to get to where you are today, with your current state of mind. It will take considerable effort on your part to change. Fortunately, it’s worth it, and the results you get will be both rapid and out of all proportion to the effort you put in.
To achieve different results, you must become a different person. You must change your goals and ideals for yourself and develop a new self-image. By the Law of Correspondence, your outer world will reflect your inner world. You must become a new person on the inside to permanently experience the good you desire on the outside.
The first and for most people the most difficult obstacle you will face is within yourself. It is your unconscious striving to remain consistent with what you’ve said and done in the past that holds you back.
This “homeostatic impulse” is another term for your comfort zone. It is your unconscious tendency to be drawn irresistibly toward doing what you’ve always done. This inability to break free of the tentacles of the past is the reason most people accomplish far less than they are capable of and remain unfulfilled and dissatisfied for most of their lives.
Homeostasis is neither good nor bad. It is a natural mechanism built in to you as part of your “standard equipment” to enable you to function automatically in a great number of areas. This mechanism keeps your body at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It maintains chemical balance in your billions of cells and governs your autonomic nervous system. It is indispensable to the proper physical functioning of your body.
Whenever you think, say or do something contrary to your current habits, your homeostatic impulse attempts to pull you back into your comfort zone by making you feel uncomfortable and uneasy. Because you always move from discomfort toward comfort, you tend to move back toward what you’re comfortable doing and move away from things that are new and challenging.
This is quite normal. Doing something different from what you’re accustomed to makes you feel tense and uneasy. Even thinking about doing something different can be stressful. Moving out of your comfort zone can be so nerve-wracking, in fact, that most people never do it until they are forced to.
Your natural tendency, if you are forced out of your comfort zone, even if you weren’t happy in it, is to recreate a new comfort zone similar to the one you just left. You will actually work to recreate a situation you didn’t like in the first place.
Many people have had the experience of losing a job they didn’t like and then going out looking for the identical job somewhere else. I remember losing my job as a dishwasher in the kitchen of a hotel, which was not a great job, and then spending the next few months applying for dishwashing jobs in other hotels.
It’s vital that you be aware of this homeostatic mechanism. It’s nature’s way of keeping you consistent with the way you’ve been in the past. But all growth and progress requires you to move out of your comfort zone in the direction of something bigger and better. Greater success and happiness are only possible for you when you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable during the process of creating a new comfort zone at a higher level of effectiveness.
Beware the siren song of old habits, of the comfort zone, luring you to stay where you are, holding you back from all the great things that are possible for you. You must consciously and deliberately counter the pull of the comfort zone as you move upward and onward toward ever higher levels of accomplishment.
The second major obstacle to change is a “hardening of the attitudes.” This is rooted in fear, as is much of the homeostatic impulse. Psychosclerosis is your natural tendency to fall in love with your own ideas, and then to vigorously defend them against anything new.
The opposite of psychosclerosis is flexibility, the willingness to consider other points of view, other ideas, with the very real possibility that you could be wrong.
This mental flexibility is the mark of the superior person. The very act of considering all options in a particular situation enables you to see much more of what is possible for you. Instead of using your intelligence to find fault with alternative approaches, you suspend judgment long enough to see if you can’t find something beneficial in a different idea, or in a new way of doing things.
This approach is essential in mental programming, in changing your mind for the better. A major reason people fail to move forward in life is that they become too rigid and inflexible in their ideas, especially in their ideas about themselves and what is possible for them. They then dwell on all the reasons why something would not work for them, rather than why it would. They act as their own prosecuting attorneys, building the case against themselves, and you as well, if you let them.
A major turning point in your thinking comes when you change your language from “whether” to “how.” When you start thinking about how you are going to accomplish something you want, and you simultaneously refuse to consider whether it’s possible or not, your entire mentality begins to change. You do get what you think about most of the time, and if you continually think in terms of how you can achieve it, and the specific actions you can take to move toward it, you are much more likely to be successful in the end.
Much of what you do is done either to get love or to compensate for lack of love, beginning in early childhood. The emotion of love exerts an enormous influence on your every choice and decision. Your self-ideal, the guiding mechanism of your self-concept and the regulator of your behavior, can be understood as your idea of the kind of person you need to be to earn the love and respect of the people you care about. Your self-esteem, what Dr. Nathaniel Branden calls “your reputation with yourself,” is largely determined by how lovable and valuable you appear in your own thinking.
Many personality problems are rooted in “love withheld.” Your adult personality is largely formed by the amount and quality of love you received during your formative years. Almost everything you do today—the goals you set, the dreams you have, the commitments you make—is influenced by the power of love in your life.
In fact, you are inevitably drawn toward the people whose love you both want and need, and you are inordinately influenced by their opinions. When you begin the process of reprogramming your mind, everything you do must be consistent with increasing the amount of love and respect you have for yourself, and that others have for you. Only in this way will you be continually motivated to make the effort necessary to become the person you are capable of becoming.
Who are the people whose love and respect are most important to you? What do you have to do and who do you have to become for them to love and respect you? These are core questions for a happy life.
Second only to the power of love in determining how you think and feel is the power of suggestion. Your multidimensional mind is affected by everything that is going on around and within you. Your suggestive environment has an immense impact on everything you become and on everything that happens to you. Any change in your physical, mental or emotional environment can change the way you think, feel and act in moments, and thereby change your results.
You are immediately influenced by changes in temperature or noise level. You are instantly affected by conversations or confrontations with other people. One unkind remark can put you off for the whole day. One bit of good news can make you happy and cheerful for hours.
Unfortunately, unless you control them carefully, most of the suggestions in your environment will tend to be negative. The radio, television and newspapers are full of “negative sensationalism.” Most conversations are filled with carping, complaining and condemning. Most people have developed the habit of “ain’t it awful” thinking and talking. Their conversations are negative and critical.
The key to your mental programming is for you to take systematic and purposeful control of your suggestive environment. It is for you to create a mental world that is predominantly positive and consistent with the person you want to be and the life you want to live. Controlling your suggestive environment requires that you decide the ingredients of your “mental diet,” for the indefinite future.
There are three additional mental laws you need to understand to effectively reprogram your mind and change your future. They are the Law of Habit, the Law of Practice and the Law of Emotion. They contain vital answers to questions about success and happiness, and they point to many of the solutions that you are seeking.
Virtually everything you do is the result of habit. The way you talk, the way you work, drive, think, interact with others, spend money and deal with the important people in your life are all largely habitual. Your behavior in every area of life is based on the accumulation of all your experiences, starting in infancy. Probably 95 percent of your actions and reactions are automatic, unconscious responses to your physical and human environment.
Your habits are major obstacles to your becoming the kind of person you want to be. Your habitual ways of thinking, feeling, talking and behaving are often roadblocks that stand between where you are today and where you really want to go. They keep you “running in place.”
The Law of Habit is a vitally important mental law. It explains the comfort zone and success and failure as well as any other single principle. It has its counterpart in physics in Newton’s first law of motion, which states that a body at rest tends to remain at rest, and a body in motion tends to remain in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force.
Your thinking and behavior are subject to the same principle. In the absence of an outside force, or a definite decision on your part to do something different, you’ll keep on doing very much the same thing indefinitely.
You’ll work in the same job, associate with the same people, eat the same foods, take the same route to work, engage in the same leisure activities, watch the same television, read the same books and live very much the same kind of life.
Habits are only good as long as they serve you, as long as their effect is to continually enrich and improve your life. It is when your habits become the major obstacles to your happiness that you have to modify them or change them completely.
Some people have developed the habit of being late for appointments or late completing assignments. But successful people are invariably punctual and dependable. People can rely on them. Successful people keep their commitments. And they respect the time of others by not inconveniencing them.
Others have the “television” or “newspaper” habit. They spend inordinate amounts of time each day watching television or reading the newspaper. Often they do both at the same time.
The most dangerous habits you can form, however, are mental habits. Because of the fact that whatever you think about continually you create in your life, your negative or self-limiting thoughts hurt you more than almost anything else you can engage in.
Your habitual modes of thinking are absolutely the most important things in your life. As Shakespeare wrote, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” You live in a mental world. Nothing around you has any meaning except the meaning you give it with your thoughts. If you change your ways of thinking, you change your life.
Success and failure, happiness and unhappiness, are largely the result of habit, of the automatic ways you respond and react to what’s going on around you. Changing habits that are no longer consistent with your higher purposes is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do, and one of the most essential to the quality of your life. But unless you’ve already reached some level of excellence or perfection, you are living today with habits that you must discard if you are going to move forward. Remember, bad habits are easy to form, but hard to live with; good habits are hard to form, but easy to live with. Your job is to form good habits and make them your masters.
The good news is that all habits are learned, and they can therefore be unlearned. You are today, in every respect, the result of your conditioning, almost like a laboratory animal. You have been trained, or have trained yourself, to be the person you are, and to get the results in life that you’re getting. Your training began before you were old enough to know what was going on, and you are today the result of the training you have engaged in over the years.
You can change if you want to. The Law of Practice states that whatever thought or action you repeat often enough becomes a new habit. You can develop any habit you consider desirable or necessary. You can become the kind of person you want to be if you can discipline yourself to think and act in a way that is consistent with your new, higher ideals long enough for them to become new habits. This is how you become a new and better person.
Because your outer world corresponds to your inner world, as you begin to develop more constructive ways of thinking and behaving, people and situations around you will begin to change, sometimes in the most remarkable and unexpected ways.
A friend of mine was involved in a messy lawsuit over a business matter. The more angry he became, the more determined and unreasonable became the other party, and so did his lawyers.
He finally decided to change his thinking. He deliberately let the whole situation drop out of his mind. He began to think charitably and compassionately about the other party. When the subject came up, he refused to allow himself to become involved or upset. He let it go.
Within a few days of his deciding to change his thinking about the lawsuit, the other person called, apologized for any misunderstanding or bad feeling, and proposed a reasonable solution. Instead of their going to court, the matter ended peacefully.
The new president of a fast-growing company was convinced that one of the executives he had inherited was playing politics and deliberately manipulating people and situations so he would appear to be more competent and more valuable to the organization than he really was.
The new president was on the verge of letting the executive go when he decided to change his thinking. He deliberately chose to reinterpret the behaviors of the executive in a favorable way. He then examined every action of the executive from the viewpoint of his being a loyal employee acting in the best interests of the company.
Somewhat to his surprise, he found that the executive’s behavior was much easier to both understand and appreciate from this perspective. He saw that the executive, far from being political in his behaviors, was extremely competent and was running interference for the new president in areas in which he was not yet familiar. The relationship between the two changed immediately, for the better, right after the president changed his thinking and began assuming the very best of intentions on the part of the other man.
Your ability to take control of your mind and begin thinking the kind of thoughts that lead to the outcomes you desire is the starting point of the process that leads to complete freedom, happiness and self-expression.
Your emotions are the energizing forces behind your thoughts. The more intensely you feel something, the greater effect that thought or circumstance will have on your life. Emotion is like an electric current, or fire, which can be either constructive or destructive, depending on how it is used.
The Law of Emotion states that 100 percent of your decisions and subsequent actions are based on emotion. You are not largely emotional, or 90 percent emotional and 10 percent logical, as has been assumed. You are completely emotional. Everything you do is based on an emotion of some kind.
Before I understood this point, I used to think I was doing the logical thing, the practical thing, the thing that “made sense” in a variety of situations. When I learned about the Law of Emotion, I realized that I was really a slave to my emotions, especially if I didn’t take time to think about which emotions had the upper hand in a particular situation or decision.
Here’s the key point: There are only two main categories of emotions: desire and fear. Most of what you do, or don’t do, is determined by one or the other. And the things you do, or refrain from doing, because of fear greatly outweigh the number of things you do because of desire.
Most people are immobilized by fears of all kinds. They fear poverty or loss. They fear criticism or disapproval. They fear ill health. They fear being taken advantage of. Above all, they fear failure and rejection to the point where they are willing to “lead lives of quiet desperation” rather than to risk having any of their fears realized. Most of the population lives this way, most of their lives.
The more you desire or fear something, the more likely you are to attract it into your life. A thought without an emotion behind it has no power to influence you one way or the other. An emotion with no thought to guide it causes frustration and unhappiness. But when you have a clear thought, positive or negative, accompanied by an intense emotion of either fear or desire, you activate the various mental laws and begin drawing whatever it is toward you.
This is why it is so important for you to keep your thoughts on the things you want and keep them off the things you fear. Happy, effective men and women recognize the power of their thoughts and they are very emphatic about keeping them positive and constructive. Your mind is so powerful that you must control it with great firmness so that it is continually moving you in the direction you want to go, or it will move you away from your desires.
Changing your self-concept is not easy. It may be the hardest thing you ever do. And the most valuable. But it is not a matter of choice. Once you have made the decision to do something important and valuable with your life, to achieve your own ideal of personal greatness, you absolutely must go to work on changing your own mentality.
There are three requirements for developing a new self-concept. These are the keys to changing the direction of your life. First, you must sincerely want to change. You must really want to become totally positive toward yourself and your possibilities. You must have an intense, burning desire to be more than you’ve ever been before.
Often, people ask me what they can do to get others to change. I remind them that the starting point of change, of accomplishing anything different or better, is desire, and desire is always personal. You can’t want something for someone else, just as you can’t set goals for someone else. It isn’t that change isn’t possible, it’s just that it requires desire on the part of the person who expects to change, or it won’t take place.
It’s like the question, “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?” The answer is, “Only one, but the light bulb must really want to change.”
The starting point of your becoming a new and better person is for you to feel that the change is desirable or necessary, or both. The change, the goal, the new personality quality must be consistent with your values, your ideals and the person you would really like to be.
Second, you must be willing to change. Many people say they want to change, but, in their hearts, they are not really willing to give up the old life, the old associations and everything else that goes with them. One person may want to be healthy but may not want to give up cigarettes. Another person may want to be financially successful, but may not want to give up having a good time every night with his or her friends.
You must be willing to let go of the old person in order to become the new person. You must be willing to stop doing certain things, even if your friends disapprove, in order to start doing the things that are consistent with the new you. You must overcome the twin obstacles of homeostasis and psychosclerosis, of the comfort zone and of inflexible thinking.
Third, you must be willing to make efforts. You must be willing to persevere for a long time without much evidence of progress. What you are aiming for is a fundamental long-term improvement in your life. It’s taken you many years to become the person you are. You must be willing to work very hard to become someone different.
One of the most powerful ways to change your mental habits and the future direction of your life is for you to go on a twenty-one-day Positive Mental Attitude (PMA) diet. For twenty-one days you keep your thoughts, words and actions consistent, all day, every day, with the goals you want to achieve and the person that you would like to become.
You need to stay on this diet for twenty-one days for two reasons. First, it takes an adult between fourteen and twenty-one days to develop a new habit of thought, a new “neural groove” in the brain, like a cow path across a pasture. Sometimes you will notice definite changes in yourself and your results much faster. But usually, habits that have taken a lifetime to form take longer than a few days to change or override.
The second reason you need to practice these methods for twenty-one days is for you to learn patience and persistence. It takes twenty-one days of calm, patience and warmth for a hen to hatch an egg. If a hen, with a brain the size of a pea, can discipline itself to sit on an egg for twenty-one days without seeing any change at all, then it is probably not too much to ask you to persevere patiently for the same period of time before expecting to see any changes. Patience in self-development is the key.
The wonderful thing about your self-concept is that it is in a continual state of evolution. You are continually evolving and growing and developing in the direction of your dominant thoughts. If you change your dominant thoughts about yourself for any period of time, your self-concept and your beliefs will begin to change and evolve in that direction as well.
The reason the self-concept of most people does not change appreciably over time is that they continue to think about the same things in the same way day after day, year after year. William James wrote, “If I see myself today as I was in the past, my past must resurrect itself and become my future.”
But when you set big, exciting goals for yourself and the person you want to be, and then think about these things every day, you take full control of your mental evolution and the direction of your life. You become what you think about.
There is a series of actions you can take every day to saturate your mind with positive influences and to assure that you are continually bombarding yourself with suggestions that are consistent with the person you want to become.
Think about yourself, in a casual and relaxed way, as the person you would like to be, with the qualities you would like to have. Begin imagining what life would be like, what your home would be like, what your work would be like, what your health would be like, and the standard of living that you would most enjoy. Allow yourself to fantasize and luxuriate in the daydream and in the feeling of achieving your goals. This activity is the first signal that a new direction is being programmed into your subconscious computer.
The first of these actions is visualization. This is perhaps the most powerful technique of self-image modification available to mankind. Your visual images become your reality. They intensify your desires and deepen your beliefs. They increase your willpower and build your persistence. They are enormously powerful.
There are four elements of a visualization. An increase in any one of them will accelerate the rate at which you create the physical equivalent of that mental picture in your life.
The first of these elements is frequency. How often you visualize a particular future event, goal or behavior has a powerful impact on your thinking, feeling and acting. People who accomplish extraordinary things visualize their desired results continually. They think about what they want to accomplish all the time. They replay the ideal image of their futures over and over, like projecting a slide on the screen of their minds. In fact, the frequency with which you visualize not only tells you how much you want to realize that picture but also intensifies your desires and your belief that it is achievable.
The second element in visualization is vividness. This refers to the clarity with which you see something in your imagination. There is a direct relationship between how vividly you can see a desired goal or result and how rapidly it appears for you.
You have often had the experience of thinking about something you wanted. Your first thoughts were vague and fuzzy, but as you thought about it more and more, and perhaps gathered information, your mental picture of what you wanted became clearer and clearer. Finally, when you could close your eyes and see it in complete detail, it materialized in your world. This is the way you achieve most goals.
Successful people are very clear about what they want, and of course, this refers to the clarity of their mental pictures. Unsuccessful people are unsure of what they want to be and do. Their fuzzy mental pictures are too vague to motivate them, or to activate the various mental laws to work in their behalf.
The third dimension of visualization is intensity. This refers to the amount of emotion that you combine with your mental pictures. When you intensely desire something, when you are excited and enthusiastic about your goals, or when you have a deep faith that you will realize a goal that you are working toward, whatever it is occurs much faster. Increasing the amount of emotion with which you accompany your visualizations is like stepping on the accelerator of your own potential. This is perhaps why Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
Unsuccessful people, on the other hand, are usually unmotivated and unexcited about what they are doing and where they are going. They have a general attitude of pessimism that keeps them functioning at a low level of energy. They tend to be more passive and accepting of things as they are, rather than being excited about things as they could be.
The fourth part of visualization is duration. This refers to the length of time you can hold the picture of something you want in your mind. The longer you imagine a desired future event, the more likely it is to appear. Whenever you can, you should get actual pictures of things or conditions you desire and look at them repeatedly, until they are accepted as commands by your subconscious mind. Your self-concept soon changes to be consistent with your new visual commands.
Do you want a new car? Then go to the dealership and take it for a test drive. Bring the brochures home, cut them up and put pictures of the car wherever you can see them. A friend of mine started doing this when he was broke and driving an old car. He test drove a new BMW every weekend. He even put a picture of the car he wanted on his steering wheel so he could imagine he was already driving the car of his dreams. And within one year, he had started a new job, learned a new set of skills, increased his income and was able to buy the car.
When you combine the elements of frequency, vividness, intensity and duration with your visualizations of anything you want to be, have or do in the future, you actually supercharge yourself and accelerate your movement toward it. You unleash your hidden powers to succeed and tap resources that enable you to accomplish things beyond anything you’ve ever done before.
Most successful people have developed this ability, through practice, to create clear, vivid mental pictures of themselves being the persons and doing the things they really want. And since your external performance is always consistent with your internal image or picture, if you see yourself as an excellent parent, spouse, executive or salesperson, you will feel more relaxed, confident and capable in that role. If you see yourself as awkward or clumsy in any role, you will feel tense and uneasy whenever you find yourself in that particular situation.
For example, most people are terrified of public speaking, of standing up in front of an audience. If this is a fear of yours, here is how you can overcome it by using mental programming techniques with creative visualization.
First, you begin to think about how your life would be different if you were an accomplished public speaker. You think of how much more confident you would feel, and how much more you would be respected and admired by others when you gave an excellent talk. You then create a clear mental picture of yourself speaking to an audience. Recall an occasion when you were speaking to your friends, or members of your family, at a party, for example. See yourself relaxed and happy. Get the feeling of calmness, confidence and pride that goes with this image of effectiveness.
Each time you think of yourself speaking in public, recall this positive mental picture and see yourself as calm, relaxed and in control, with the people in your audience responding to you in a positive, supportive way.
To accelerate your self-image modification, you purchase books on public speaking and, as you read, you think of yourself doing what the author is describing. Perhaps you listen to an audiocassette program that instructs you on how to prepare and organize a talk. It tells you how to design the opening, the body of the talk and the closing. Perhaps you attend seminars and meetings and watch other speakers. As you do, you imagine yourself up there speaking to the audience. Over time you gradually find your fear diminishing and your desire to speak increasing.
Does this process work? It certainly does! It has worked for more than 3 million members of Toastmasters International since that organization was formed in 1923.
The Toastmasters process was designed for men and women who felt their careers were being held back because of their fear of speaking to groups, giving group presentations or even speaking up at meetings.
At a typical Toastmasters meeting, everyone gets an opportunity to stand up and speak, if only for a few seconds. The audience is made up of others who also want to be able to speak on their feet. They are positive and supportive of one another. When a member goes home, he has a mental image, or picture, of a positive speaking experience. And every time he goes to a meeting and speaks, that image is reinforced.
Here’s a remarkable discovery: Your subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between a real experience and one that you vividly imagine. Every time that you recollect, remember and re-experience an event in your conscious mind, your subconscious mind accepts it and stores it exactly as if you had just repeated it.
What this means is that, if you have just one positive experience, in any area of your life, and you think about this positive experience over and over, you actually program yourself to do it again. And if you haven’t had such a positive experience yet, you can imagine or create one in your mind and dwell on that. Your subconscious won’t know that you made it up.
The power of visualization works with negative experiences as well. One negative experience, dwelled upon repeatedly, will de-motivate and discourage you in that area. So choose your thoughts and your mental pictures with care.
If you’ve had even one positive experience of speaking well before a supportive audience, you can recall and relive that experience whenever you think of public speaking. This process of repeated visualization enables you to actually program yourself for self-confidence and excellent performance in speaking in the future.
If you have a mental picture of yourself as fit and healthy, in a slim, trim body, and you visualize that picture over and over, your subconscious mind will gradually begin to adjust your appetite, your metabolism and your desire for exercise and healthy living. The excess weight will fall off and stay off. You will be “thinking thin,” and it is the only known method for permanent weight loss that seems to work.
If you find yourself lacking confidence in any situation, cancel the negative thought by repeatedly visualizing yourself as calm, confident and relaxed when you’re in that situation. Recall a situation in which you had a terrific time with a group of other people. Whenever you feel nervous around others, change your mental picture and think instead of a previous positive experience. Eventually, your subconscious mind will transfer the positive feeling associated with the positive situation over to the situation that usually causes you to feel tense and uneasy. Your fears will gradually diminish and disappear.
Use visualization to flood your mind at every opportunity with pictures of your ideal life. One way of doing this is to create a “treasure map” to look at. Design a poster for your wall with either your photograph or a picture of the goal that you wish to achieve in the center. Then cut out pictures, headlines and quotations from magazines and newspapers and paste them all over the poster. Create a powerful visual representation of the ingredients that symbolize success and achievement for you.
Take some time each day to stand in front of this poster and drink in the images, letting them soak into your subconscious mind. In each important area of your life, dwell upon your success experiences, real and imagined. Recall and relive them vividly. If you are in sales, for example, and you have had a successful sale, dwell on that sale repeatedly. Think about it vividly in every detail as often as you can. Each time you dwell on a success experience, your subconscious records it as though you are having yet another success experience of the same kind.
Using visualization, you can convince your subconscious mind that you are repeating the success experience over and over. Your subconscious mind will then make your words, your actions and your emotional responses fit a pattern consistent with the images of success that you have supplied to it.
The mistake that most people make is that they dwell upon and vividly imagine their failure experiences, what went wrong and how they goofed. Then they are surprised when they feel tense and anxious the next time they are in a similar situation.
All improvement in your life begins with an improvement in your mental pictures. Your mental pictures trigger thoughts, feelings, words and actions consistent with them. Visualization activates all the mental laws, including the Law of Attraction, drawing people and resources into your life to help translate your images into your realities.
The second technique of mental programming is the use of affirmations. Affirmations are based on the three “P’s.” They art positive, present tense and personal. Affirmations are strong statements or commands from your conscious mind to your subconscious mind. They override old information and reinforce new, positive habits of thought and behavior.
The affirmation “I like myself” is positive, present tense and personal. When you repeat it continually, it is eventually accepted as a valid description of the reality you desire. You actually begin to feel better about yourself in everything you do. This affirmation soon overrides old data you may have taken that is inconsistent with high self-esteem.
With affirmations, your potential is unlimited. Strong, affirmative statements, emotionalized and repeated with conviction, often bring about immediate personality changes. You can increase your enthusiasm, boost your courage, assert control over your emotions, and build up your self-esteem by repeating statements that are consistent with the person you want to be.
One of the most powerful influences on your subconscious mind is what you say to yourself and believe. Affirmations like “I can do it!” or “I earn $XXX per year” or “I weigh XXX pounds” can bring about lasting changes in your self-concept and in your results.
All change is from the inner to the outer. All change begins in the self-concept. You must become the person you want to be on the inside before you see the appearance of this person on the outside.
Your subconscious mind is very literal, and the simpler the command, the more impact it has on your thinking. For example, a powerful affirmation I use regularly to condition my mind is, “I believe in the perfect outcome of every situation in my life.”
This affirmation makes you feel calm, positive and relaxed in dealing with any difficulty. It is a wonderful antidote to worry. “I believe in the perfect outcome of every situation in my life.” It is an excellent antidote to worry.
It is also simple, clear and in the present tense. Your subconscious mind responds only to this type of command, to affirmations and mental pictures that are presented in the “now,” as though the goal or quality already existed.
For example, instead of saying, “I am not going to smoke anymore” (both negative and in the future tense), you would say, “I am a nonsmoker.”
This is a way of “telling the truth, in advance.” This is how you convince your subconscious mind that the condition you desire already exists. Your subconscious then makes whatever changes are necessary, internally and externally, to align your inner world with your desired outer reality.
We have had a variety of interesting experiences with people quitting smoking. One of our graduates repeated, “I am a nonsmoker,” several times a day for two months. Simultaneously, he visualized himself as a nonsmoker. Over that time, he gradually found himself reaching for a cigarette less and less often. By the end of the two months, he was down to one cigarette a day, and he finally quit and had no further desire to smoke even two years later.
Another seminar graduate did the same thing. He repeated, “I am a nonsmoker,” over and over, but nothing happened. He continued to smoke two packs a day. He affirmed and visualized himself as a nonsmoker every single day, patiently trusting that the process of mental reprogramming would eventually work.
At the end of eight weeks, he woke up one morning, reached for a cigarette, lit it and almost choked. He said that he thought he had gotten hold of a “rotten” cigarette, whatever that is. He tried a second cigarette and a third. Each one of them made him retch. He suddenly realized that he had programmed himself into believing that smoking was a totally distasteful habit. He never touched a cigarette again.
You cannot change habits overnight. You must be patient and persistent in affirming and visualizing, confidently believing and expecting that, when you are ready, the desired changes will occur, and not before.
The third technique is to verbalize, to affirm aloud, with others, or alone, in front of a mirror. Standing in front of a mirror and saying very clearly and emotionally, “I can do it, I can do it, I can do it!” is a powerful way to build up your confidence for a coming challenge. Anything that you say aloud with conviction and enthusiasm has double the impact of an affirmation that you make quietly to yourself.
When you insist to others that you can or will do something, it has powerful impact on your thinking and your subsequent behavior. Sports teams use this method of verbalization with others to get themselves mentally prepared before a game. They chant and cheer together before they go out into competition.
Keep your conversation throughout the day consistent with what you really want to happen. Refuse to discuss your fears and misgivings. Be positive and optimistic in everything you say. Be cheerful. You’ll be amazed at how much better you feel and how much more confidently you behave when your language is upbeat and success oriented.
The fourth technique of mental programming is to walk, talk and act exactly as if you were already the person you desire to be. Behave as if you have already achieved the goals you’ve set for yourself. Act as if you were recognized and respected by everyone. Act as though you had money in the bank already. The power of this technique is explained by the Law of Reversibility.
This law states that, when you feel positive and optimistic, your feelings will generate actions and behaviors consistent with them. The opposite is also true. If you do not feel positive, but you act enthusiastically or cheerfully anyway, despite how you feel, your positive behavior will generate positive feelings, just as your positive feelings generate positive behavior. Your feelings and behavior are reversible.
It is almost impossible to “act the part” of a happy, cheerful person for more than five or six minutes without actually having a “backflow” experience in which your actions create the emotions that are consistent with them. Another way to put it is, “Fake it until you make it.” Behave positively and enthusiastically and you will soon feel positive and enthusiastic.
The reason this method is so powerful is that, even if you cannot control your feelings at any given moment, you can control your actions. And if you control your actions, by this Law of Reversibility, you will create the emotional state that you desire.
Using this technique, you can deliberately create in yourself the mental qualities of a high-performing man or woman. You can act with purpose, courage, confidence, competence and intelligence. You can pretend that you already have each one of these qualities, and surprisingly enough, you will soon feel these qualities in yourself. People will then accept you and respond to you exactly as if you were the person you see yourself as being.
These four techniques are enough in themselves to completely transform your self-concept and your personality: Begin by thinking of yourself as you would ideally like to be. Then visualize yourself in vivid detail, as though you already were the person that you intend to become. Affirm to yourself, and verbalize aloud, strong, positive statements consistent with your goals. Remember as you do this that words do create emotion and crystallize thought. And finally, keep your behavior consistent with your new messages of success, happiness, prosperity and a positive personality.
Technique number five in the PMA diet is to feed your mind continually with words and images consistent with the direction in which you are growing. Read books and magazines for personal and professional development. Listen to educational audiocassettes at every opportunity. Watch educational videocassettes. Attend seminars and lectures and take additional courses that accelerate your development of these new habit patterns of thought.*
The more you read, listen, watch and learn about any subject, the more confident and capable you feel in that area. If you are in management, and you are continually learning how to be a better and more effective manager, you will more and more often see yourself and think about yourself as excellent in your field. If you are in sales, and you continually feed your mind with information and ideas that help you to be better, you will feel better about your ability to perform, and you will actually make more sales. As you improve your inner understanding, you improve your outer results.
Technique number six is to get around the right people. Associate with winners. Fly with the eagles rather than scratching with the turkeys. Because of the strong suggestive influence that other people have on you, for good or for ill, you must be extremely careful about who you choose to spend time with.
Dr. David McClelland of Harvard found, after twenty-five years of research, that the choice of a negative “reference group” was in itself enough to condemn a person to failure and underachievement in life. Your reference groups are the people you identify with—the ones you work with, socialize with, live with and get involved with in community or nonwork activities. Like a chameleon, you unconsciously adopt the attitudes, behavior and opinions of the people with whom you most closely associate.
In selecting the people that you will spend time with, follow Baron de Rothschild’s advice and “make no useless acquaintances.” To meet new, positive people, you usually have to stop associating with your old group. Especially, get away from negative people. They are the primary cause of most unhappiness in your life.
Staying in a bad relationship can be enough in itself to cut off your full potential for success and happiness. There is no suggestive influence more powerful than the people around you. Select them with care.
The seventh technique for internalizing these ideas is for you to teach others what you are learning. You become what you teach. You teach what you are. When you attempt to articulate and explain a new concept to someone else in order to help him or her, you understand it and internalize it better yourself. In fact, you only really know something to the degree to which you can teach it to someone else and have them understand and apply it in their own lives.
Developing new, positive habits of thought and behavior is not easy. It requires eternal vigilance. You must launch your new habits strongly. Never allow exceptions until the new habit is locked in. When you slip from time to time, the important thing is that you don’t dwell on it. Your job is to keep your mind focused intently on the direction that you are going, on your dominant goals, and on the new person you are becoming.
Whatever you can hold in your mind on a continuing basis, you can have. Forget the way you were in the past. Discard past labels. It is how you see yourself, how you talk about yourself and how you act now, in the present, that is creating your future.
If you see yourself now as you wish to be, and you walk, talk, and behave as the very best person you can imagine yourself being, your dominant thoughts and goals will materialize as your reality. You will become what you think about most of the time.
Select one positive habit pattern or behavior that you would like to develop, and for the next twenty-one days, discipline yourself to think, visualize, verbalize, affirm and behave in a manner consistent with the new habit you want to develop.
Whatever your goals and ambitions, think and talk in terms of their accomplishment. Read, learn, visualize, affirm and dwell on your goal. Think in terms of “how” you can achieve it. Act as if it were already a reality, if you can. At the very least, behave in every respect as if achieving your goal were inevitable.
The key to making these methods work for you is for you to demonstrate to yourself, in a specific area, that you can develop one important habit or attitude of your own choosing. Once you have proved this to yourself, you will have the self-confidence and the conviction to make any change or to accomplish any goal that you could set for yourself. Instead of wishing or hoping, you will know that your possibilities are unlimited.