Your outer world corresponds to your inner world. What happens to you depends to a great degree on what is happening inside you. Your external experience is a reflection of your internal thought patterns. Over time, you create in your life the mental equivalent of your innermost convictions about yourself and what is possible for you.
As I read story after story of famous men and women, as I reflected upon their biographies and autobiographies, I was struck by the common thread that ran through all of them. They all seemed to have, or to develop, an unshakable belief in their ability to overcome all obstacles and reach some great height.
This belief or conviction seemed to give them powers not possessed by the ordinary person. They went on to accomplish remarkable things, often against overwhelming odds and in defiance of the predictions of people around them.
When I left high school and began drifting from job to job, I had no central aim or purpose aside from somehow “seeing the world.” Like most people, I slipped into the “reactive-responsive mode.” I took whatever job came along. I associated with whoever happened to be around at the time. Instead of planning my life, I just reacted to my external environment and responded to my emotional and physical needs.
I assumed that this was “all there is.” I came to accept, unconsciously, that what I knew and what I was doing constituted the upper limits of what was possible for me. The best I felt I could do was to react as intelligently and as constructively as possible and try not to make too many mistakes.
When my studies in psychology, religion and metaphysics mentioned the subconscious mind, I neither understood it very well nor attempted to use it to help me. However, the more I learned about the mental laws that govern our behavior and determine our results, the more I realized there was a hidden dimension of achievement that I was missing.
The more I understood the importance of the self-concept and learned that everything we do is predetermined by our belief systems, the more I felt I was coming closer to the combination that would open the lock.
Then I understood the meaning of human potential. If you and I are using only 10 percent or less of our potential for effectiveness and achievement, the other 90 percent or more must be contained in mental powers we have not yet tapped. I concluded that, to get the most out of myself, I needed the “access codes” that would enable me to get into and harness these enormous capabilities.
Your subconscious mind is enormously powerful. When you use it properly, it can help you to move more rapidly toward the achievement of your goals and desires than you ever dreamed possible. You can use your subconscious mind for creation or destruction, for good or for evil. You can be a prince or a pauper, depending on the way you use your subconscious mind. To fulfill your potential, you must learn how to access it at will and use it for your purposes intelligently and constructively.
My lawyer was showing me through his offices not long ago. He took me into the typing pool where there were several secretaries typing letters and legal documents. Each of the secretaries was hooked into a minicomputer that was available and accessible to all of them. As we left the room, he explained to me that he and his partners had spent more than one hundred thousand dollars on this computer installation, which they had purchased about two years ago. He told me that when it was installed, all the secretaries working there at that time were given training in how to use the computer to increase the quantity and quality of legal work they could produce.
Over time, he said, all of the original secretaries had left or gone on to other things. They were replaced, one by one, with legal secretaries who had no computer training. “Because we are so busy,” he said, “no one has had a chance to go back and train these new secretaries on how to get the most out of our computer system, so now instead of using this computer for advanced information and word processing, our secretaries simply use it as a glorified typewriter, typing one letter or one document at a time and spending many hours to produce what the minicomputer could produce in a few minutes.”
Unfortunately, most people are like those secretaries. They work every day with their minds—but they use their powerful mental computers only for the most rudimentary tasks and then wonder why their work is so hard and why they seem to produce so little.
When I was washing dishes, I was convinced that the only way I could make more money was by working longer hours and by washing even more dishes. I eventually learned that the belief that you can only improve your life with longer hours and harder work leads you down a blind alley. The answer I found was to work “smarter,” to use more of my mental powers rather than more of my physical powers to achieve my goals.
Successful people are those who have learned how to operate their conscious and subconscious minds in harmony, enabling them to get the things they want far faster and with much less effort. This discovery changed the focus of my efforts and the direction of my life.
Here is a simple model to help you visualize your subconscious mind, how it operates, how you can control its functions and what it produces in your life.
Imagine two balls stuck together, a golf ball and a basketball, with the golf ball on top. This picture represents the relative power and capability of your conscious and your subconscious minds, with the basketball being your subconscious. The two minds are essential to each other, but they have their own separate areas of operation.
In computer terms, your conscious mind is the programmer, inputting data very much like a computer operator, by what it decides to allow in to your thinking. Your subconscious mind is the hardware of your computer, the framework within which data operates. Your self-concept is the software program that determines what you produce in your life. All are necessary and interdependent, and everything that happens to you is determined by your understanding of this special computer language and also your skill at using it.
Your conscious mind is your objective or thinking mind. It has no memory, and it can only hold one thought at a time. This mind has four essential functions.
First, it identifies incoming information. This is information received through any of the six senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, touch or feeling.
Your conscious mind is continually observing and categorizing what is going on around you. To illustrate, imagine that you are walking along the sidewalk and you decide to cross the street. You step off the curb. At that moment, you hear the roar of an automobile engine. You immediately turn and look in the direction of the moving automobile to identify the sound and where it is coming from. This is the first function.
The second function of your conscious mind is comparison. The information about the car that you have seen and heard goes immediately to your subconscious mind. There, it is compared with all of your previously stored information and experiences with moving automobiles.
If the car, for example, is a block away, and moving at thirty miles per hour, your subconscious memory bank will tell you that there is no danger and that you can continue walking.
If, on the other hand, the car is moving toward you at sixty miles per hour and is only one hundred yards away, you will get a “danger” message that will stimulate further action on your part.
The third function of your conscious mind is analysis, and analysis always precedes the fourth function, deciding.
Your conscious mind functions very much like a binary computer, performing two functions: It accepts or rejects data in making choices and decisions. It can deal with only one thought at a time, positive or negative, “yes” or “no.” It is continually sorting impressions, deciding which are relevant to you and which are not.
So, you are walking across the street, you hear the roar of the moving automobile, and you see that it is bearing down on you. Because of your knowledge of the speed of moving vehicles, your analysis tells you you are in danger and that some decision is required. Your first question is, “Do I get out of the way? Yes or no?” If the decision is “yes,” then your next question is, “Do I jump forward? Yes or no?” If the decision is “no,” because of cross traffic, then your next question is, “Do I jump backward? Yes or no?” If your decision is “yes,” this message is instantly transmitted to your subconscious mind and in a split second, your whole body jumps back out of the way, with no additional thought or decision on your part.
You didn’t have to use your conscious mind to think about whether you should put your right foot or left foot back first. Once you gave the command, from your conscious mind to your subconscious mind, all the necessary nerves and muscles were coordinated and put into action in a single instant to obey your decision.
The mathematician Peter Ouspensky, in his book In Search of the Miraculous, estimated that your subconscious mind functions at as much as thirty thousand times the speed of your conscious mind. You can demonstrate this speed of operation by holding your hand out in front of you and wiggling your fingers. By turning all coordination of movement over to your subconscious, you can do this easily. Then, try to thread a needle, this time using your conscious mind, and see how much mental effort and concentration you must exert to perform a few small movements of your hand, when your subconscious isn’t operating.
Your conscious mind functions like the captain of a submarine looking at the surface through a periscope. Only the captain can see. Only the captain’s perception of what is going on on the surface is available to the crew.
Whatever the captain sees, feels and decides is immediately relayed throughout the submarine and the entire crew swings into action to carry out his instructions.
You often feel limited in what you can do because you are so determined to be “in control.” You are often convinced that the way to get better or different results is to “try harder.” But this isn’t the answer at all.
The way to really improve your life is to use more of your master mind, your subconscious powers, by understanding how to activate them. To do this, you need to know what your subconscious does and how it works.
Your subconscious mind is like a huge memory bank. Its capacity is virtually unlimited. It permanently stores everything that ever happens to you. By the time you reach the age of twenty-one, you’ve already permanently stored more than one hundred times the contents of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. Under hypnosis, older people can often remember with perfect clarity events from fifty years before. Your unconscious memory is virtually perfect. It is your conscious recall that is suspect.
The function of your subconscious mind is to store and retrieve data. Its job is to ensure that you respond exactly the way you are programmed. Your subconscious mind makes everything you say and do fit a pattern consistent with your self-concept, your “master program.”
Your subconscious mind is subjective. It does not think or reason independently; it merely obeys the commands it receives from your conscious mind. Just as your conscious mind can be thought of as the gardener, planting seeds, your subconscious mind can be thought of as the garden, or fertile soil, in which the seeds germinate and grow.
Your conscious mind commands and your subconscious mind obeys. Your subconscious mind is an unquestioning servant that works day and night to make your behavior fit a pattern consistent with your emotionalized thoughts, hopes and desires. Your subconscious mind grows either flowers or weeds in the garden of your life, whichever you plant by the mental equivalents you create.
Your subconscious mind has what is called a homeostatic impulse. It keeps your body temperature at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, just as it keeps you breathing regularly and keeps your heart beating at a certain rate. Through your autonomic nervous system, it maintains a balance among the hundreds of chemicals in your billions of cells so that your entire physical machine functions in complete harmony most of the time.
Your subconscious mind also practices homeostasis in your mental realm, by keeping you thinking and acting in a manner consistent with what you have done and said in the past. All your habits of thinking and acting are stored in your subconscious mind. It has memorized all your comfort zones and it works to keep you in them. Your subconscious mind causes you to feel emotionally and physically uncomfortable whenever you attempt to do anything new or different, or to change any of your established patterns of behavior.
Your subconscious mind functions like a gyroscope or a homing beam, keeping you in balance and on track based on the data and instructions that you have previously programmed into it.
You can feel your subconscious pulling you back toward your comfort zone each time you try something new. Even thinking about doing something different from what you’re accustomed to will make you feel tense and uneasy.
Applying for a new job, testing for a driver’s license after several years, calling on new customers, taking up a new, challenging assignment or approaching a member of the opposite sex and feeling nervous or awkward—all are examples of your feeling out of your comfort zone.
A major difference between leaders and also-rans is that superior men and women are always stretching themselves, pushing themselves out of their comfort zones. They are very aware how quickly the comfort zone, in any area, becomes a rut. They know that complacency is the great enemy of creativity and future possibilities.
For you to grow, to get out of your comfort zone, you have to be willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable doing it the first few times. If it’s worth doing well, it’s worth doing poorly until you get a feel for it, until you develop a new comfort zone at a new, higher level of competence.
If you aren’t willing to face feeling clumsy and inadequate initially—in sales, in management, in sports, in personal relationships—you will get stuck at a low level of achievement. Your biggest battle is almost always with yourself and your biggest challenge is in breaking free of your old habitual ways of thinking and acting.
In Chapter Two, I introduced seven mental laws and explained how everything that happens to you begins with your thoughts. In Chapter Three, I explained how your master program, your self concept, determines how you think in the first place, especially the origination of your fears. Your subconscious mind contains the hard disc where the instructions for these laws are stored. In addition, there are three more laws that help to explain who you are today, and why things happen to you the way they do.
The Law of Subconscious Activity states that any idea or thought that you accept as true in your conscious mind will be accepted without question by your subconscious mind. Your subconscious will immediately begin working to bring it into your reality.
Your subconscious mind is the seat of the Law of Attraction, the sending station of mental vibrations and thought energy. When you begin to believe that something is possible for you, your subconscious mind begins broadcasting mental energies and you begin to attract people and circumstances in harmony with your new dominant thoughts.
Your subconscious mind regulates the type of information from your environment that you will see, hear and be aware of. It will sensitize you to any information that you’ve told it is important. And the more emotional you are about anything, the more rapidly your subconscious will alert you to things you can do to bring it into your reality.
For example, if you decide that you want to buy a red sports car, you will suddenly start to see red sports cars at every turn. If you start to plan a foreign trip, you will begin to see articles, information and posters on foreign places everywhere you go. Your subconscious mind works to bring to your attention the things you may need to make your desires a reality.
When you begin thinking about a new goal, your subconscious takes this new thought as a command. It begins to adjust your words and actions so they are more consistent with your achieving it. You begin to do and say the right things at the right time to help you move toward it.
As you change your self-concept, and your beliefs about your possibilities, your subconscious mind gradually makes you feel more comfortable, more confident as the new, better person you are becoming. You actually create a new comfort zone for a better, higher level of personal performance.
The Law of Concentration states that whatever you dwell upon, grows. The more you think about something, the more it becomes part of your reality.
This law explains much of success and most of failure. It is a paraphrase of the Law of Cause and Effect, or sowing and reaping. It says that you cannot think one thought and get a different result. You cannot plant oats and get barley. Successful, happy people are those who have developed the ability to concentrate single-mindedly on one thing, and to stay with it until it’s complete. They discipline themselves to think and talk only about what they want, and to keep their minds off what they don’t want.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A man becomes what he thinks about most of the time.” Effective people guard the doorways of their minds diligently. They remain focused on what’s really important to them. They dwell on their desires for the future and refuse to entertain their fears and doubts. As a result, they seem to accomplish extraordinary things in the same amount of time that the average person spends just living from day to day.
When I became excited about my own personal development, I went from focusing on too little to reading and getting involved in too much. I scattered my energies everywhere. I diffused my focus. I was busy, committed and overactive. I was positive and excited about many possibilities and I was negative and critical about others. I was like a car careening from one side of the road to the other, often ending up in the ditch.
I eventually learned that “more is less.” I learned that the Law of Concentration is very powerful and that I couldn’t be working on several things at once and end up doing any of them particularly well.
So I cut back. I stopped every activity except for the one or two that were most important to me. Most of all, I disciplined my thinking and dedicated myself to concentrating on and talking only about what I really wanted.
Here is a test for you: For one day, twenty-four hours, see if you can think about and talk about only the things you want. Resolve to keep your conversation free of all negativity, doubt, fear or criticism. Discipline yourself to speak cheerfully and optimistically about each person and each situation in the world around you.
It won’t be easy. It might not even be possible for you, at first. But this exercise will show you how much of your time and energy is spent thinking and talking about things you don’t really want. This exercise, repeated, will open your eyes and prepare you to get the most from the ideas coming in the chapters ahead.
This is one of the most important of all the mental laws. It is an extension of the Law of Control. It states that your conscious mind can hold only one thought at a time, and that you can substitute one thought for another. This “crowding out” principle allows you to deliberately replace a negative thought with a positive thought. In so doing, you take control of your emotional life. This law is your key to happiness, to a positive mental attitude and to personal liberation. It can change your relationships, your conversations and the predominant content of your conscious mind. Many people have told me this law alone has changed their lives.
Your conscious mind is never empty; it is always occupied with something. By using the Law of Substitution, you can replace any negative or fearful thought that may be troubling you. You can deliberately substitute a positive thought in its place.
This powerful method of mental control is how you keep your mind calm and at peace. You choose to think about something uplifting, like your goals, whenever you are faced with a situation that would normally upset you.
In using the Law of Substitution to change your mind from negative to positive, the fastest way is simply to stop talking and thinking about the problem and to start talking and thinking about the solution. Focus your mind on what can be done in the future rather than what has happened in the past.
Thinking about a solution is inherently positive. When you think about what you can do, what action you can take, rather than dwelling on what has happened, your mind becomes calm and clear in an instant. Thinking about someone you care about, or your next vacation, is another way to use this law. Your objective is to find ways to keep your mind positive by consciously choosing to replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts. And you are always free to choose your thoughts.
One of the most powerful things you can say, over and over, to build your self-esteem and improve your overall self-concept is, “I like myself! I like myself! I like myself!”
Whenever things go wrong, or you feel unhappy for any reason, you can neutralize the feelings with the words “I like myself.”
Every time you say, “I like myself,” and especially when you say it with enthusiasm and conviction, your subconscious mind accepts it as a command. It then works to override and cancel any previously recorded messages you may have taken in that are inconsistent with high self-esteem and peak performance.
Many of our seminar graduates have transformed their personalities by simply repeating “I like myself!” fifty or one hundred times every day. You’ll feel good about yourself the first time you say it, and as you repeat it over and over, you’ll feel better and better.
In Chapter Three, on the master program, we talked about several methods of self-concept development, and how you could take control over your own personal evolution by saturating your mind with messages and inputs that are consistent with the person you want to become.
The methods of visualization, affirmation, verbalization, acting the part, associating with the right people and feeding your mind with the appropriate books, tapes and articles are tested and proven ways to change your thinking about yourself and your possibilities. They work consistently and predictably. They should become as natural to you as you go through your day as breathing in and breathing out.
These techniques of mental programming are similar to the commands you use when you are operating a computer. They are straightforward and effective, and they enable you to get results faster than in any other way. They are indispensable to your personal and professional growth.
But they are not enough. They are “basic commands.” There are even faster working methods. Just as there are “power commands” in computer programs that allow you to accelerate the process of generating output, there are a series of special techniques you can use to greatly speed up the process of subconscious reprogramming. These techniques enable you to change your self-concept and your attitudes of mind at a speed that is often amazing. And since your outer world quickly reflects your new inner world, you immediately begin to see changes in your external reality.
In times past, many of these principles and techniques were guarded and only made available to a small number of carefully selected people. Some of these methods of rapid reprogramming have only been developed in the last few years. The one thing they have in common is that they have been proven to work by countless thousands of people through the ages. They are the keys to the lock in the door of personal transformation.
To benefit the most from these techniques, you need intense, burning desire for personal improvement. You need the ability to trust, and to persist patiently, confidently, knowing that there is a cumulative effect to all of your efforts, and that you will ultimately achieve the riches and rewards that you desire.
The first giant step in the field of personal transformation was made by Doctor Emile Coué in Geneva in 1895. His clinic was achieving recovery rates averaging five times faster than any other similar hospital or clinic in Europe. His technique was so simple that for a long time, it was not believed or accepted. He simply taught each of his patients to say, “Every day in every way, I’m feeling better and better.”
The doctors and nurses would greet each patient by saying, “Every day, in every way, you are looking better and better.” As simple as this sounds, it worked wonders in bringing about rapid healing and recuperation from a variety of major and minor illnesses.
The success of Dr. Coué led to further work by a German doctor, Johannes Shulz, on methods to accelerate healing. Dr. Shulz was a psychologist and was looking for ways to help people overcome depression, neurosis, anxiety and other mental conditions that were interfering with their happiness. What he discovered was that the more relaxed one was while talking to oneself and saying, “Every day in every way, I’m feeling better and better,” the faster one recovered.
Dr. Shulz eventually developed the process known as “autogenic (self) conditioning.” He found that if you used a systematic process to relax the patient and then encouraged him or her to visualize and affirm positive, constructive messages, the new information seemed to go straight to the subconscious mind, and once it was accepted by the subconscious, rapid and noticeable improvements in physical and mental health could be seen.
Over the years, autogenic conditioning was developed extensively in Europe and it is now extremely popular in most European countries. It has reached such a sophisticated level today that it is now used to help people with a variety of things, from mental disorders of all kinds to sales effectiveness, public speaking and athletic training.
The East Germans developed autogenic conditioning to the highest level of any country in the world. Their techniques were so advanced that they were treated as state secrets. By using these techniques, the East Germans won more gold medals per capita in the Olympics than any other country in the world. Autogenic conditioning enabled them to program their athletes to perform at extraordinary levels.
One of the reasons autogenic conditioning works so well is that it uses a vitally important mental law, the Law of Relaxation. This law states that “in all mental working, effort defeats itself.”
This is the opposite of the way things work in the physical world. If you wish to drive a nail into a board in the material realm, the harder you hit the nail, the faster and deeper it will penetrate.
However, if you wish to develop a new pattern of thought, the opposite is true. The more you relax, or “don’t try,” the faster the thought seems to be accepted by your subconscious mind and the faster the physical result of the thought or goal appears in your world.
Here is an example of a technique based on the principles of autogenic conditioning and relaxation that has had an incredible impact on my life and the lives of many others. It is so powerful it should be taught to everyone. It is almost infallible in enabling you to achieve your goals. It will enable you to conquer worry and fear and to generate feelings of calmness, confidence and self-control.
This technique is based on another application of the Law of Reversibility. You recall the first application of this law. It states that, just as feelings generate actions, actions generate feelings. You can act your way into feeling, and the feeling will then generate the actions consistent with it. Either one can create the other. This is an essential aspect of accessing your master mind and unlocking your potential.
The second application of the Law of Reversibility is that, just as an objective state, an actual accomplishment or a success of some kind, creates a subjective state, the feeling of happiness and achievement, the subjective state will also create the objective state.
To put it another way, if you can create the feeling, or the emotion, that you would experience if you accomplished a goal or solved a problem, and you can hold that feeling, the feeling will create, in your physical world, the result that goes with it—the result that would trigger the emotion if the result had actually occurred.
Here is an illustration. Imagine you go to a theater to see an exciting adventure movie. You arrive at the theater ten minutes before the earlier scheduled movie is over. Instead of waiting in the lobby, however, you go into the theater, sit down and watch the last ten minutes of the movie.
You see how the entire plot unfolds and how everything turns out for the principal actors. You see the problems resolved and what happens to everyone when the movie ends.
Then, when the next showing begins, you go back and sit through the entire movie from the beginning. Only this time, instead of being caught up in the suspense and drama of the unfolding plot, you relax and watch the movie objectively. You take time to appreciate the cinematography, the dialogue, the way that the scenes are connected and how the plot unfolds and develops. You are calm and relaxed. You are far less anxious or emotional than you would be if you had not already seen the last ten minutes. Because you already know how it ends.
This is exactly the same method you use to program your new self-concept, and your goals, into the deeper levels of your subconscious mind, where they “lock in” and take on a power of their own. The emotional component is critical. It is the calm, confident, expectant, positive emotion, combined with relaxation, that activates your subconscious and brings about rapid change. This mental state, self-induced, is followed very quickly, sometimes instantaneously, by the physical manifestation of your desired result.
Here is a five-step process you can use to implement this method to help bring about any desired mental, emotional or physical condition.
Step one, verbalize and affirm your desired outcome. For example, if you are wrestling with a problem involving someone else, you could say, calmly and confidently, ’This situation is resolved happily with good for all concerned.” Your statement should be a clear description of your desired outcome or end state. Don’t get wrapped up in detail. Don’t worry about the process.
Step two, visualize and clearly see the outcome you desire in this situation. See yourself, and everyone else involved, happy and at peace with the outcome. This will require effort and concentration.
Step three, emotionalize your combined affirmation and visualization by creating “the feeling” that you will actually experience when everything is resolved happily. Imagine yourself already successful, the goal already attained.
Step four, and this is the catalyst in the process, release the situation completely. Let it go just as you would if someone you trusted said that he would take care of it and that you need not ever think about it again.
Step five is realization, the appearance in your outer world of the solution. The realization or manifestation of your desire is in direct proportion to the extent to which you have completely released all concern for the outcome and turned your mind to other things. “According to your faith, it is done unto you.”
Once more, the five steps to activating the Law of Reversibility are (1) verbalization, articulating in words the desired outcome; (2) visualization, creating a clear mental picture of what the outcome will look like; (3) emotionalization, creating in yourself the feeling of satisfaction that would accompany the resolved situation; (4) releasing all concern while you turn your mind to other things; and finally, (5) realization, the appearance of the solution, or the achievement of your goal.
This attitude of calm, confident expectation that all will be well is an experience of higher consciousness. Religious people refer to this as prayer, and it is said that prayer is the highest form of affirmation. Ralph Waldo Trine called this state of consciousness being “In Tune with the Infinite.” It doesn’t matter what you call it. All that matters is that it works with amazing reliability. The reason for this is that it activates your superconscious mind, which we’ll discuss thoroughly in Chapter Six.
There are several additional mental techniques you can use to activate your master mind and accelerate the process of inner change and external realization. Each of these methods is a combination of the mental programming techniques for changing your self-concept explained in Chapter Three.
Each of them is extremely effective and when you use them regularly, alone or together, you can transform yourself and your life in wonderful ways.
The first of these methods for accelerated change is “written affirmation technique.” To use this technique, you sit down with a pad of paper or a notebook, preferably in the morning, and write out a clear, present-tense description of your major definite purpose or goal, exactly as you would like to see it in reality. The description can be as long or as short as you like. It can be brief or detailed. You can write a present-tense description of the way you would like to see the events of the day unfold, or you can describe how you would look and feel with the new personality qualities you desire.
Once you’ve written out your goals, put down your pen, close your eyes, breathe deeply, and visualize your goal as accomplished, or see the events of the day unfolding satisfactorily. As you visualize, create the feeling that would go with your imagined success. Smile and enjoy the pleasure that would accompany the achievement of your goals. Then, release it completely, let it go, open your eyes, and carry on with your day.
Writing is a powerful way to imprint your goals on your subconscious mind. Many people have had the experience of writing out a list of their goals for the year on January first, just once, and then rereading the list at the end of the year and finding that most of the goals have somehow been achieved.
The more often you write out your goals, the more rapidly they materialize. Use a spiral notebook and write them down every day. It only takes a few minutes, but it programs you for the hours ahead. Writing and rewriting your goals convinces you more and more that they are attainable. As your conviction deepens and your confidence grows, you become more alert and aware of opportunities to make them a reality. You activate the Laws of Attraction and Correspondence and the goals begin to materialize around you. Many of our seminar graduates have been astonished at how rapidly their lives began to improve once they began using this technique.
The second mental programming technique you can use is “standard affirmation technique.” This consists of writing out your goals in bold letters on a series of three-inch by five-inch index cards. You write the things you want as affirmations, in the present tense and in words that are clear and definite.
This method is best used twice per day, morning and evening. Find a place where you can be alone and quiet for a few minutes. Take several deep breaths to relax your body and prepare your mind. Exhale slowly. Sit comfortably with your cards in your lap. Then read the first of your goals. Close your eyes and repeat it to yourself five times. Visualize your goal as it would be if it were already achieved. Imagine how you would walk, talk and act if the goal were a reality right now. Emotionalize your picture of the goal and create the feeling of pleasure and happiness that would accompany successful accomplishment of your desire.
Then take another deep breath, exhale and release the goal confidently. Do this with each of your goals. Your subconscious mind can work effectively in this way on ten to fifteen goals at a time. (You’ll learn an advanced system for setting your goals in Chapter Five, The Master Skill.)
This entire exercise should not take more than thirty to sixty seconds for each goal, for a maximum of fifteen minutes for fifteen goals. By doing this in the morning before starting out, you send a strong set of signals to your subconscious mind. It then activates the Law of Attraction and heightens your awareness of anything going on around you during the day that could help you accomplish one or more of your goals. By reviewing your goals in this way again in the evening, immediately before sleeping, you set your subconscious mind to work on your goals during the night. Often, it will bring you ideas and solutions when you awake in the morning.
The third acceleration method is called “quick affirmation technique.” You can use this technique before any nonrecurring event of importance, such as a sales call or a meeting with your boss. This method of mental programming is used by professional speakers, actors, entertainers and top business people. They use it to prepare themselves for upcoming events when it is important that they be at their best.
The quick affirmation technique consists of telescoping the steps to mental preparation we discussed earlier. It is like a mental warmup. You can do it in less than thirty seconds. You can use this technique in your car, in the elevator, or even in the washroom.
The way it works is simple. You get by yourself, close your eyes, affirm the ideal outcome, visualize it, emotionalize it and release it. See and feel the event working out successfully. Then go into the meeting (or whatever) with calmness and confidence.
If you have an important presentation or interview coming up in a few days, you should use this technique every time you think about it. Instead of looking forward with nervousness and anxiety, use the Law of Substitution and perform this quick affirmation technique. As you get closer and closer to the actual day and hour, you will feel yourself growing in confidence and self-assurance. By the time the actual event arrives, you will be mentally prepared to perform at your best.
The fourth accelerating technique is the complete process of “autogenic conditioning” that we discussed earlier. This is a more elaborate exercise, in which you systematically relax your entire body before affirming, visualizing, emotionalizing and releasing.
In its simplest form, you can get most of the benefits of autogenie conditioning by assuming a comfortable position, either sitting in a comfortable chair or lying on a bed. You close your eyes, breathe deeply and begin talking to the six parts of your body—your left arm, your right arm, your left leg, your right leg, your chest and your head.
These are the words that seem to work the best. Begin by repeating six times, one breath to one repetition, “My left arm is becoming heavy and warm.” Then repeat six times, “My left arm is now heavy and warm.” Finally, say six times, “My left arm is completely heavy and warm.”
Each time you inhale and exhale, you speak one command. Repeat this process with each of the other five parts of your body, going from your left arm to your right arm, then from your left leg to your right leg, then to your chest and finally to your head and neck.
In less than ten minutes, you will have talked your body down into a deep state of relaxation. Your mind will be in the alpha state. You will then be ready for deep programming.
This technique is sometimes called self-hypnosis or autosuggestion, and is extremely effective in two areas. First, you can use it to overcome fears and build confidence in your relationships, work, financial life, health and other activities. It can even help solve such problems as call reluctance in salespeople, fear of public speaking and nervousness in dealing with any challenge of daily life. Second, you can use it to accelerate the development of motor skills and sports ability in areas such as tennis, golf, skiing, hockey, figure skating, football, and basketball.
It is a form of mental rehearsal. You practice the movements over and over in your imagination, visualizing perfect performance every time and programming that image of excellence into your subconscious mind.
Your subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between a real experience and one that you vividly imagine, especially one that you vividly imagine when you are deeply relaxed. Your subconscious merely accepts the mental picture as a command to guide future action. The next time you actually perform the activity you will be much more relaxed and confident. You will be noticeably better than you were before.
Most gold-medal-winning Olympic athletes use this technique or something similar to it. Successful business people use it to give themselves the psychological advantage in any meeting, negotiation or confrontation. And it works better and better the more you practice it.
The fifth technique of rapid mental transformation is called “heterogenic conditioning.” This is conditioning or programming by someone other than yourself.
Your self-concept has been formed largely as the result of two primary forms of suggestion: autosuggestion, the things that you have said to yourself and believed, and heterosuggestion, the things that other people have said to you that you have believed. Everything you believe to be true about yourself today is the result of one of these influences, especially the second.
You are already aware of some examples of heterogenic conditioning. These are the things that your parents, your older relatives, your teachers or other people you respect have told you about yourself. Other heterogenic examples are lectures or audiocassette programs in which the speaker uses the word “you” in making each recommendation.
Whenever you hear the word “you” attached to a message, it influences your subconscious mind. That is why you must never allow anyone to say anything to you about yourself that you do not sincerely desire to be true. You are dealing with a very powerful principle and you must use it deliberately in a positive and constructive way.
During the 1950s and 1960s in Bulgaria, psychologist Georgi Lozanov conducted extensive research on the process by which people learn and permanently record information. He was intrigued by examples of “superlearning” from around the world, such as the fact that Muslim students memorize and recite the entire Koran, a book the size of the New Testament, before entering any Muslim university.
Lozanov found entire religions in India with no written books or materials. The masters and disciples of these religions passed down their teachings orally from one generation to the next. He met people who could recite religious teachings for hours with no reference to notes.
As his research progressed, Lozanov became interested in the idea that each of us actually has two brains, a right and a left hemisphere, and they perform different functions.
For example, the left brain is the logical, linear, practical brain. It is responsible for reasoning, analysis and calculation. It is the mathematical, verbal, sequential, pragmatic and skeptical side of the brain. It is responsible for language and for processing facts and is concrete and straightforward. It is the “no-nonsense” or engineering side of the brain.
The right hemisphere of the brain is very different. It thinks in terms of pictures and stories. It is holistic, dealing with all aspects of an idea or situation simultaneously. The right hemisphere is intuitive, musical and creative. It is the artistic, abstract and imaginative side of the brain.
The left brain seems to be stimulated by intense, logical, linear presentation of information. The right brain seems to process information best in a state of relaxation. What Lozanov discovered was that it was when both brains were working together harmoniously that rapid learning took place.
Lozanov went on to pioneer research into the various levels of brainwave activity—beta, alpha, theta and delta. He found that in our normal waking state, beta, the brain functions at fourteen waves per second or faster. In alpha, the relaxed or meditative state just below beta, the brain functions at eight to thirteen waves per second. This seemed to be the ideal brain wave level for learning.
The third level of brain wave activity is theta, five to seven waves per second, and the fourth is delta, the state of deep sleep, where brain waves slow to one-half to four waves per second.
Lozanov was interested in accelerating the speed at which the brain absorbed and stored new information. He developed what is today called “accelerated learning” by combining all these findings into a new way to learn and retain information of any kind.
Lozanov discovered that if you could put a person into a deep state of relaxation, into alpha, and then present new information while gentle classical music played in the background, the right and left brains would synchronize and learning would take place at a rapid rate.
His experiments involved having classes of adults sit deeply relaxed with their eyes closed while music played softly in the room. The instructor would then read lists of words in a foreign language, repeating them in different ways.
Afterward, the students would be brought to full alertness and tested for retention. With this method, the students learned at a remarkable rate. They remembered 98 percent of what they had been taught.
In 1969, Lozanov was able to teach students 150 new words per three-hour session, easily three to five times the rate of learning in a traditional language school. Later, he increased the learning rate to 500 words per day and then to 1,000 new words in a single day, by using more advanced combinations of relaxation, music and repetition.
In 1974, with a special class of students, Lozanov increased the learning rate to 1,800 new words of a foreign language in one day, still maintaining a retention level of 98 percent.
In 1979, Lozanov was able to teach a special class 3,000 new words, the equivalent of fluency in a foreign language, in a single day. Six months afterwards, these students could still recall 60 percent of what they had learned, compared with the 10 percent average recall rate in an American university. The work of Lozanov demonstrated that rapid learning is possible—not only for facts and information, but also for new behaviors and new mental habits.
By combining the discoveries of Lozanov with a combination of affirmations, music and relaxation, you can vastly accelerate the speed at which you achieve your goals and develop the personality characteristics you desire. This form of heterogenic conditioning is the use of taped affirmations with music.
There are two ways you can use this particular method. The first is by listening to subliminal tapes, which I do not recommend. You simply do not know what message is on the tape. Some of the expensive tapes sold in the mass marketplace have been found to have no messages on them at all.
The second method of taped affirmations with music is called “progressive relaxation.” With this method, a clear voice counts you down into a state of deep relaxation against a background of gentle classical music. This combination of words and music activates your right brain and drops you into the alpha state. While you are in this state of relaxed awareness, the positive messages, combined with the music, bypass your critical, conscious mind and go straight into your subconscious, where they bring about rapid personality change.
Taped affirmation with music is healthy and refreshing in its own right. At the end of a series of positive messages, the voice on the tape counts you back to full alertness. You open your eyes feeling relaxed, refreshed and happy.
Taped affirmation is effortless and easy. A typical taped affirmation process is only about twenty minutes long. It is a form of active meditation. If you practice it twice a day, morning and evening, you will be more positive, more relaxed, more creative and in far better control of your emotions. Many of your minor ailments will clear up, and I am aware of cases in which major illnesses disappeared when people started using this technique regularly.
You can create your own affirmation tapes* and put your own goals onto them. You simply play relaxing music that you enjoy on one record or tape player, while you read your affirmations, with the music in the background, onto a second tape player. It is very hard to make a mistake, and even a homemade tape can be very effective in programming you to achieve your goals.
Sometimes people ask me which of these methods they should use. My answer is that you should use as many of them as you feel comfortable with, and whichever one is most convenient for you at any given time. Ideally, your entire day should be one continuous affirmation. You should be walking, talking and behaving in a cheerful and positive manner, visualizing and feeling enthusiastic about everything you do.
Your mental movies, combined with emotionalization, are the previews of your life’s coming attractions. Your biggest single job is to exert the self-control, self-mastery and self-discipline needed to keep your words, thoughts and pictures off what you don’t want and focused squarely on what you do want. Add to this a dash of confident expectations and you are on your way to a positive mental attitude and a happy, satisfying life.
Take a specific situation in your life, an upcoming event or something that is worrying you and causing you stress. Each time you think of the situation, apply the quick affirmation technique and then release it. Do this until the event has passed successfully or the situation has been resolved satisfactorily.
Next, get yourself a package of three-inch by five-inch index cards. There are packages available with spiral binding that you can make into your own affirmation book. Write out your goals, one per card, in clear, present-tense language. Review them twice per day using the standard affirmation technique until you see your goals materializing around you.
Make your own relaxation tape with music and listen to it regularly, until the messages are firmly embedded in your subconscious mind and you begin to see the results in the world around you.
As you go through your day, behave as if you are already the kind of person you want to be, and as if you have already achieved the goals you want to achieve.
Get that “end of the movie” feeling and just relax. Carry yourself with calm confidence and positive feelings of success and happiness, knowing that if you can hold it in your mind, you can have it. And you will.
Many years ago, in ancient Greece, a traveler met an old man on the road and asked him how to get to Mount Olympus. The old man, who happened to be Socrates, replied by saying, “If you really want to get to Mount Olympus, just make sure that every step you take is in that direction”
The moral of the story is simple. If you want to be successful and happy, just make sure that your every thought and action are taking you in that direction.
Sir Isaac Newton is generally considered to be the greatest scientist who ever lived. His breakthroughs in mathematics and physics laid the groundwork for the modern age. In his later years, he was asked how it was that he, one man, had managed to make such significant contributions to the world of science. He replied: “By thinking of nothing else.”
In its simplest terms, success begins with you exercising your power of choice to take systematic, purposeful control over the thoughts you hold in your conscious mind. By rigorously disciplining yourself to think and talk only about what you want, and by refusing to dwell upon the things that you don’t want, you begin your journey toward the stars.
The quality of thoughtfulness goes hand in hand with the evolution of character and the development of personal effectiveness. The mental laws we’ve discussed so far are tools to think with. They make you more aware of who you are, how you got that way, and more important, how you can get to where you want to go in the future.
Most people spend their lives in a form of sleep. They go busily about their daily activities almost totally preoccupied by a continuous stream of disorganized thought. You’ve experienced this phenomenon when you’ve gotten into your car and driven to work or across town, lost in thought, with almost no memory of the trip at all.
Many of your habitual routines and conversations take place with a low level of awareness, almost as if you were in a mental fog, and with your having little or no recollection of the particular flow of events.
Sometimes, this preoccupation and busyness is deliberate. You use it to avoid thinking about parts of your life that you would rather not confront or deal with. Sometimes it is simply automatic. You have been going through the motions for so long that your thought processes are automatic.
You only wake up temporarily when you are shocked or surprised, such as when you are cut off in traffic, or scared or caught off guard, but as soon as you recover your composure, you slip back into the warm, gentle stream of waking sleep and your thoughts just flow past amid a continual collage of feelings and images.
To become all you can be, you must live more consciously. You must become more alert, more aware and more awake. You must take more control over your thought processes so that the combined power of the various mental laws is moving you in a direction of your own choosing rather than steering you blindly on a form of mental autopilot.
You begin this process of awakening by reflecting on parts of your life—past, present and future. As an exercise in awareness, start by imagining that, before you were born, somewhere on the other side of the cosmos, you had evolved over many lifetimes to become a particular type of person with a particular set of qualities, interests, talents and abilities. It doesn’t matter what you think about the idea of reincarnation. This exercise is just that: an exercise with a point that will become clear.
Continuing this line of thought, imagine that you deliberately chose your parents, that you chose the situation you were born into and brought up in. You did this because, at your stage of personal growth and evolution, there were specific lessons about yourself, about life and about other people that you had to learn, and which you could learn in no other way.
Imagine also that the person you are today, especially the good qualities you’ve developed, evolved largely or partially as the result of the difficult experiences you had growing up and especially as the result of the problems you had with one or both of your parents.
Here is an important question: If you learned that you had deliberately chosen your parents and that the person you are today has come about as a direct result of your choice, how would this discovery change your attitude toward your parents and the experiences of your childhood? Would you be more positive and accepting of them? Would you see yourself and your past experiences in a different light? Would you become more philosophical and objective toward what might have appeared, up to now, to have been a difficult time of your life?
As you begin to think about this idea, about having deliberately chosen your parents, you begin to see possibilities that you had totally ignored up to now. Instead of seeing yourself as a passive agent or victim caught up in circumstances beyond your control, you begin to see yourself as an active participant in your own evolution.
Let’s take this exercise a little further. Imagine that you are here on this earth to do something wonderful with your life, to become an exceptional person and to make an important contribution to your world. Imagine that this is all part of a great master plan that has been carefully designed with your best interests in mind, and that every event and circumstance of your life is an indispensable part of a big jigsaw puzzle, the outline of which you can only begin to see when you stand back and start to look at your life from a higher plane.
Assume, as a general rule, that whatever your current situation or difficulty, it is exactly what you require, right now, to teach you something you need to know before you can continue on your upward journey. With this perspective, you can see that every experience is a positive experience if you view it as an opportunity for growth and self-mastery.
Now, project backward, and with calmness, clarity and a positive mental attitude, think about how every previous experience and situation of your life might have been sent to you, at exactly the right time for you, to teach you something you needed to learn so that you could continue moving toward the wonderful life that awaits you.
Imagine that the events of your life could not have been otherwise than they were, especially if you were operating on autopilot most of the time. As you stand back and appreciate the incredibly complex, interconnected events that have brought you to where you are in life right now, you will begin to develop the perspective of the philosopher, of the superior intellect. You begin to superimpose on your experience what is called a “sense of coherence,” an attitude and a feeling that your life is part of something greater than yourself and that everything fits together and happens for a reason.
As you think of your life as a series of events and experiences that are conspiring toward your achieving some great goal or making some great contribution to mankind, you begin to develop a “sense of destiny,” the hallmark of potential greatness as a human being.
These mental exercises enable you to begin unlocking the powers of your subconscious mind. They enable you to put these laws to work in a deliberate and systematic way.
You activate the Law of Control by choosing consciously to view yourself as an active creative influence in your own life. When you take mental control, you place your hands firmly on the steering wheel of your own destiny. You become the architect of your own future.
You free yourself from the Law of Accident when you become aware of the role of your own thoughts in directing the course of your life.
You activate the Law of Cause and Effect when you stand back from your day-to-day life and reflect upon the incredible number of coincidences that have shaped you into the person you are today. You see that nothing happened by accident. You realize that everything happened, and is happening, as the result of immutable law—even if you can’t see clearly where your life is going at the moment.
You trigger the Law of Belief when you accept that your life and your experiences are leading you toward the accomplishment of something important. The more you think about this as inevitable, the more likely it is to come true for you. Your beliefs do become your realities.
You apply the Law of Expectations when you confidently expect to gain something worthwhile, if not invaluable, from everything that happens to you. This attitude of confident self-expectancy makes your life into more of an adventure, with unpredictable but happy events occurring to move you toward some positive outcome. You become more optimistic and cheerful, as well as calm and relaxed, and your expectations do become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Your positive, future-oriented thinking triggers the Law of Attraction. You begin drawing into your life people and circumstances in harmony with your dominant thoughts of hope and optimism and confidence. The more you think of yourself and your life as uniquely blessed and important, the more you attract to yourself the ideas, opportunities and people that make your dreams come true.
Consistent with the Law of Correspondence, you see yourself as a special person put on this earth with a special purpose, and your outer world of relationships, health, work and material accomplishments begin to reflect your inner attitudes of mind.
As you plant these thought seeds into your subconscious by continually holding them in your conscious mind, by the Law of Subconscious Activity, your subconscious begins to make all your words, feelings, actions and even your body language fit a pattern consistent with your new self-concept and your new goals.
You use the Law of Substitution continually, knowing that your major responsibility in this process is to keep negative thoughts of fear, anger and self-doubt out of your mind. You do this by holding thoughts of faith, hope and love instead, until these new thoughts are firmly rooted and growing with a life and power of their own.
You apply the Law of Concentration by dwelling continually on thoughts of courage and confidence, of hope and love and on the wonderful future life has in store for you. You take time each day to sit and soak your mind in positive and uplifting thoughts, knowing that whatever you dwell upon long enough and hard enough will eventually materialize in the world around you.
Your greatest need is to be patient, calm and trusting. These mental laws are the most powerful forces ever discovered. You will achieve what you are meant to achieve when you are ready for it, when your mind is thoroughly prepared. Whatever you want, wants you. Whatever you desire is moving toward you right now, just as you are moving toward it. Your primary job is to decide exactly what you want, which we’ll discuss in Chapter 5, and then to get out of your own way, which we’ll discuss in Chapter 7.
Developing a positive, constructive way of looking at your life requires thoughtfulness. Developing a superior way of thinking requires that you become more alert, more aware and more awake. Harmonizing all these mental laws so that your life improves in every way requires a new attitude toward yourself and your possibilities.
It may be difficult at first, but the payoff for you will be a heightened sense of self-control and self-mastery, a more positive mental attitude, and a tremendous feeling of empowerment in every part of your life.
Take a sheet of paper and make a list of all the things that you want to see in your life. Write down everything that you can think of. Happiness, health, good friends, travel, prosperity, financial success, popularity, recognition, the respect of others ... let your imagination run freely.
Here is the hard part: For the next twenty-four hours, think and talk only about the things on your list. See if you can get through one entire day without criticizing, condemning, complaining or getting angry, upset or worried about anything. See if you have the willpower and strength of character to think about only what you want for one whole day.
This exercise will give you a real insight into where you are in your development, and it will also show you how far you have to go. In the next chapter, you will learn the master skill of success, and how to achieve virtually any goal you could ever set for yourself.