Psycho Cybernetics – More Out of Life : Warrior Mind Podcast #378
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In this episode of the Warrior Mind Podcast I’m going to go over the concepts of Psycho Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz and how you can get more out of life.
Psycho Cybernetics – Get More Living Out of Life
by Maxwell Maltz
- Experience Is Important
“Human beings always act and feel and perform in accordance with what they imagine to be true about themselves and their environment.”
People’s experiences are similar to a machine’s programming. Both lead to certain outcomes, and both can be changed. As the field of psychology developed, it became clear that even in a controlled laboratory, people could use experiences “imagined vividly and in detail” to change outcomes.
- You Can Change Your Self-Image And Success Mechanism
“Whether we realize it or not, each of us carries about with us a mental blueprint or picture of ourselves…It has been built up from our own beliefs about ourselves. But most of these beliefs about ourselves have unconsciously been formed from our past experiences, our success and failures, our humiliations, our triumphs, and the way other people have reacted to us, especially in early childhood.”
Although you are not conscious of it, your self-image has developed as a result of your past experiences. You tend to believe this self-image, and live your life based on this belief of yourself. This explains how some people seem to always be successful, and others constantly fail. Their subsequent experiences will support the self-image they have of themselves.
The first practical applications involve internalizing the following five concepts:
- Your success mechanism must have a goal or target that you believe already exists (it can exist in actuality, or in potential).
- Your mechanism focuses on the END, NOT the MEANS. When you supply the goal, your mechanism finds a way.
- Making mistakes helps to direct you toward your goal. It provides an autocorrect that helps you redirect towards your goal.
- You gain skill by redirecting your errors until you are heading in the right direction. Then, you must FORGET the past (the errors), and focus on the final successful choice that led you in the right direction.
- Trust in the process without worrying about it or trying to adjust it.“You must “let it” work, rather than “make it” work.” Your success comes as you act, and the proof of your success follows, so you can’t look for success before actions.
- The Importance Of Imagination
“For imagination sets the goal “picture” which our automatic mechanism works on. We act or fail to act, not because of “will,” as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.”
Your thoughts and actions are based on what you imagine as truth. Hypnosis is an excellent example of this in action. “Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what “you” think or imagine to be true.”
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- Using Rational Thinking And Relaxation
” Scientific experiments have shown that it is absolutely impossible to feel fear, anger, anxiety, or negative emotions of any kind while the muscles of the body are kept perfectly relaxed.”
Rational thinking works for changing beliefs and behaviors. You do not have to unbury every negative unconscious thought in order to change. Focusing on a mistake or guilty feelings can make the mistake the actual goal. Instead, remember that negative experiences helped you orient towards your goals, and then can be forgotten as you practice traveling in the right direction towards your goals.
- Making Happy Habits And Having A Successful View
“Happiness is not something that is earned or deserved. Happiness is not a moral issue, any more than the circulation of the blood is a moral issue…Happiness is simply a “state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant a good share of the time.” If you wait until you “deserve” to think pleasant thoughts, you are likely to think unpleasant thoughts concerning your own unworthiness.”
Happiness is not selfish, wrong, or something to be earned. Being happy leads to unselfishness, creativity, and helpfulness – naturally. Unhappiness leads to terrible, even criminal behavior.
- S-ense of direction
- U-nderstanding
- C-ourage
- C-harity
- E-steem
- S-elf-Confidence
- S-elf-Acceptance
Sense of direction is about maintaining your own personal focus and goals, rather than trying to go where other people think you should. It’s also about always having a goal you are working for.
Understanding comes when you can separate fact from opinion. This often means taking a step back, and seeing a situation/memory/feeling for what it really is, rather than from a biased viewpoint. “Admit your mistakes and errors but don’t cry over them. Correct them and go forward.”
Having courage to act on your goals and beliefs can make them reality. You can practice courage by taking small steps every day in little things, like striking up a random, friendly conversation with a stranger.
Charity can start with treating other people with more kindness. This leads to treating yourself with more kindness. Charity recognizes that people are valuable and important. Appreciate others, care about them, and treat them with care.
Esteem involves having a healthy, good mental picture of yourself and treating the people around you with appreciation.
Self-confidence grows as successful experiences increase. You can develop this by “remembering past successes, and forgetting failures.”
Self-acceptance is accepting yourself right now for who you are, and remembering that, “Creating a better self-image does not create new abilities, talents, powers – it releases and utilizes them.”
- Get An Emotional Face Lift And Unlock Your Real Personality
Someone with a good self-image will not easily become emotionally damaged. The same for someone with a self-reliant attitude. “Assume responsibility for your own life and emotional needs.”
It is your response to experiences that can leave emotional scars. Practice relaxation, and focusing on peaceful images. This will help prevent these scars.
- Self-Tranquilizing
Often your responses to stimuli are conditioned – things you have learned to do, and now do automatically. An example is picking up your phone whenever you hear a notification. You can undo this condition. If you can’t ignore the stimulus, start by delaying your response to it. As you learn to not respond, you are actually practicing relaxation. This state of relaxation encourages positive feelings, which is a natural form of tranquilizer. Remember the relaxation exercises at the beginning of the book. “Protect yourself from disturbing stimuli by maintaining the relaxed attitude.”
Mentally create a quiet room – a place of total relaxation in your mind. Go to this mental place to rest, have a break from stimulus, and renew yourself. Practice going to this room before sleep, and before tackling challenges. You will begin to carry this calmness to other parts of your life – with positive benefits.
Another calming practice is to refuse to respond to all of the negative possibilities you might think of during the day. Instead, focus on your goals, and dismiss ‘what ifs’ as unreasonable and not worthy of a response.
- Finding The Good In Crisis And Feelings
“A “crisis” is a situation which can either make you or break you. If you react properly to the situation, a “crisis” can give you strength, power, wisdom you do not ordinarily possess.”
To learn to turn crisis into opportunity, you first need to practice reacting to challenges without the pressure of a crisis situation. This is similar to practicing fire drills before a fire. You learn the actions without stress so you can take those same actions when the pressure is on. You also carry over an attitude of calmness and competence. Learn to react to crisis with an active (rather than a passive) response. Finally, evaluate ‘crisis’ situations so you can identify the true ones from ones that are not true crises.
- Better Days, Better Life
“I believe that there is ONE LIFE, one ultimate source, but that this ONE LIFE has many channels of expression and manifests itself in many forms. If we are to “Get More Living out of Life,” we should not limit the channels through which life may come to us. We must accept it, whether it comes in the form of science, religion, psychology, or what not.”
What you believe works in your life will very often work for you. Even your views of aging will impact how you age. There are seven needs that, when fulfilled, lead to a better life. These needs are for love, security, creative expression, recognition, new experiences, self-esteem, and the need for “more life – the need to look forward to tomorrow and to the future with gladness and anticipation.”
Closing Notes
Key take-away:
Your life is like a machine that you can develop, control, and change through your thoughts and beliefs.
Actionable insights:
- Develop a healthy self-image based on facts
- Work with a success mechanism, believing and thinking about great possibilities you can achieve
- Use the power of your imagination to learn complete relaxation, successful imagery, and mental practice of future physical actions
- Develop happy habits, practice self-hypnosis, and turn crisis into opportunity
- Embrace opportunities to live a long, happy, healthy life
- “The imagination, aimless, may provide pleasant entertainment. Applied purposefully, it can effectively program your self-image and, in turn, your Automatic Success Mechanism to realize whatever goals you choose.”
- “You can give problem-solving or idea-getting tasks to your servo-mechanism, send it off on a search while you do other things, even while you sleep, and have it return with useful material you didn’t know you knew and might never have obtained through conscious thought or worry.”
- “You act and feel not according to what things are really like, but according to the image your mind holds of what they are like. You have certain mental images of yourself, your world, and the people around you, and you behave as though these images were the truth, the reality, rather than the things they represent.”
Original Source of article: http://www.meaningfulhq.com/psycho-cybernetics-by-maxwell-maltz.html
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