Psycho Cybernetics Quotes

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You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life)
Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a ‘real’ experience.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life)
A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment...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.
Maxwell Maltz (The New Psycho-Cybernetics: The Original Science of Self-Improvement and Success That Has Changed the Lives of 30 Million People)
The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of making one.
Maxwell Maltz (New Psycho-Cybernetics)
It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life)
Conscious effort inhibits and ‘jams’ the automatic creative mechanism.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life)
We age not by years but by events and our emotional reactions to them.
Maxwell Maltz (New Psycho-Cybernetics)
Adopt the motto—"It doesn't matter who's right, but what's right.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Skill in any performance whether it be in sports in playing the piano in conversation or in selling merchandise consists not in painfully and consciously thinking out each action as it is performed but in relaxing and letting the job do itself through you. Creative performance is spontaneous and ‘natural’ as opposed to self-conscious and studied.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life)
Do not tolerate for a minute the idea that you are prohibited from any achievement by the absence of in-born talent or ability. This is a lie of the grandest order, an excuse of the saddest kind.
Maxwell Maltz (New Psycho-Cybernetics)
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance. —Bruce Barton
Maxwell Maltz (New Psycho-Cybernetics)
If you intend to insist on justice in order to live a successful and happy life, you will not do so in this lifetime, on this planet.
Maxwell Maltz (New Psycho-Cybernetics)
The "Success-type" personality is composed of: S-ense of direction U—nderstanding C-ourage C-harity E-steem S-elf-Confidence S-elf-Acceptance.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Our present state of self-confidence and poise is the result of what we have "experienced" rather than what we have learned intellectually.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life)
It is common knowledge among psychologists that most of us underrate ourselves, short-change ourselves, sell ourselves short. Actually, there is no such thing as a superiority complex. People who seem to have one are actually suffering from feelings of inferiority; their "superior" self is a fiction, a coverup, to hide from themselves and others their deep-down feelings of inferiority and insecurity.
Maxwell Maltz (The New Psycho-Cybernetics: The Original Science of Self-Improvement and Success That Has Changed the Lives of 30 Million People)
He must have a burning desire to solve the problem. But after he has defined the problem sees in his imagination the desired end result secured all the information and facts that he can then additional struggling fretting and worrying over it does not help but seems to hinder the solution.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life)
You make mistakes. Mistakes don't make you.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics)
I don't like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything," said Henry Ward Beecher.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
your nervous system cannot tell the difference between a real experience and one that is vividly imagined.
Maxwell Maltz (New Psycho-Cybernetics)
The most liberating of all thoughts is disregard or “disconcern” for what other people think. Famous mail-order impresario and entrepreneur J. Peterman wrote (in his autobiography Peterman Rides Again); “Once you realize that most people are keeping up appearances and putting on a show, their approval becomes less important.” Excessive concern over what other people think inhibits personality more than any other factor.
Maxwell Maltz (New Psycho-Cybernetics)
Happiness is a mental habit, a mental attitude, and if it is not learned and practiced in the present it is never experienced. It cannot be made contingent upon solving some external problem. When one problem is solved, another appears to take its place. Life is a series of problems. If you are to be happy at all, you must be happy - period! Not happy "because of".
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Get yourself a goal worth working for.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
The individual who is actively engaged in a struggle, or in striving toward an important goal, does not come up with pessimistic philosophies concerning the meaninglessness or the futility of life.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Functionally, a man is somewhat like a bicycle,” I told him. “A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it is going forward towards something. You have a good bicycle. Your trouble is you are trying to maintain your balance sitting still, with no place to go. It’s no wonder you feel shaky.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
The clay or putty-like material stays soft and malleable enough to do so many, many times. In his infinite wisdom, God manufactured the self-image of similar material, so it remains malleable throughout our entire lives. No one is ever too old, too jaded, too frightened, or too traumatized to “wet the clay” and begin remaking it as they imagine and desire.
Maxwell Maltz (New Psycho-Cybernetics)
If you can remember, worry, or tie your shoe, you can succeed with Psycho-Cybernetics!
Maxwell Maltz (New Psycho-Cybernetics)
The self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment. It defines what you can and cannot do. Expand the self-image and you expand the “area of the possible.” The development of an adequate, realistic self-image will seem to imbue the individual with new capabilities, new talents, and literally turn failure into success.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
You must have a clear mental picture of the correct thing before you can do it successfully.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes. —William E. Gladstone
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
The important thing for you to remember is that it does not matter in the least how you got the idea or where it came from. You may never have met a professional hypnotist. You may never have been formally hypnotized. But if you have accepted an idea - from yourself, your teachers, your parents, friends, advertisements, from any other source - and further, if you are firmly convinced that idea is true, it has the same power over you as the hypnotist's words have over the hypnotized subject.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Our errors, mistakes, failures, and sometimes even our humiliations, were necessary steps in the learning process. However, they were meant to be means to an end - and not an end in themselves. When they have served their purpose, they should be forgotten. If we consciously dwell on the error, or consciously feel guilty about the error and keep berating ourselves because of it, then - unwittingly - the error or failure itself becomes the "goal" that is consciously held in imagination and memory.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Stop measuring yourself against “their” standards. You are not “them” and can never measure up. Neither can “they” measure up to yours—nor should they. Once you see this simple, rather self-evident truth, accept it, and believe it, your inferior feelings will vanish.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
If you can remember, worry, or tie your shoe, you can succeed.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
To the degree that we deny the gift of life, we embrace death.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
It doesn't matter who’s right but what's right.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Learning the happiness habit, you become a master instead of a slave, or as Robert Louis Stevenson said, “The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it is going forward towards something. You have a good bicycle. Your trouble is you are trying to maintain your balance sitting still, with no place to go.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
I have found that one of the commonest causes of unhappiness among my patients is that they are attempting to live their lives on the deferred payment plan. They do not live, or enjoy life now, but wait for some future event or occurrence. They will be happy when they get married, when they get a better job, when they get the house paid for, when they get the children through college, when they have completed some task or won some victory. Invariably, they are disappointed.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information that you give to it from your forebrain. Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you think or imagine to be true.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
You act, and feel, not according to what things are really like, but according to the image your mind holds of what they are like. You have certain mental images of yourself, your world, and the people around you, and you behave as though these images were the truth, the reality, rather than the things they represent.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
There are “standard” convictions which are strongly held by nearly everyone. These are (1) the feeling or belief that one is capable of doing his share, holding up his end of the log, exerting a certain amount of independence, and (2) the belief that there is “something” inside you which should not be allowed to suffer indignities.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Knowledge Gives You Power.
Maxwell Maltz (New Psycho-Cybernetics)
Remember, above all, that the key to any crisis situation is you.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way To Get More Living Out of Life.
Hal Elrod (The Miracle Morning: The 6 Habits That Will Transform Your Life Before 8AM)
Positive thinking” cannot be used effectively as a patch or a crutch to the same old self-image.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
The New Psycho-Cybernetics with Maxwell Maltz and Dan Kennedy.
Rachel Rofe (The 30 Minute Happiness Formula)
Happiness is simply “a state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant a good share of the time.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
1. “Do Your Worrying Before You Place Your Bet, Not After the Wheel Starts Turning
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
It has been amply demonstrated that attempting to use effort or willpower to change beliefs or to cure bad habits has an adverse, rather than a beneficial, effect.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Psychologist H. L. Hollingworth said that happiness requires problems, plus a mental attitude that is ready to meet distress with action toward a solution.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
It doesn’t matter how many times you have failed in the past. What matters is the successful attempt, which should be remembered, reinforced, and dwelt upon.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Decide What You Want—Not What You Don’t Want
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
from impulsive and ill-considered actions; the other is
Maxwell Maltz (New Psycho-Cybernetics)
In expecting to grow “old” at a given age we may unconsciously set up a negative goal image for our Creative Mechanism to accomplish.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Ideas are changed, not by will, but by other ideas
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of making one. —Elbert Hubbard
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Dr. Norton L. Williams, a psychiatrist, addressing a medical convention, said that modern man’s anxiety and insecurity stemmed from a lack of self-realization, and that inner security can only be found “in finding in oneself an individuality, uniqueness, and distinctiveness that is akin to the idea of being created in the image of God.” He also said that self-realization is gained by “a simple belief in one’s own uniqueness as a human being, a sense of deep and wide awareness of all people and all things, and a feeling of constructive influencing of others through one’s own personality.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
His experiments proved that the best way to break a habit is to form a clear mental image of the desired end result, and to practice without effort towards reaching that goal. Dunlap found that either "positive practice" (refraining from the habit) or "negative practice" (performing the habit consciously and voluntarily) would have beneficial effect provided the desired end result was kept constantly in mind.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Remember the fairy story “The Elves and the Shoemaker”? The shoemaker found that if he cut out the leather, and laid out the patterns before retiring, little elves came and actually put the shoes together for him while he was sleeping.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
In an interview in 1992, Leary stated, “It is a genetic imperative to explore the brain. Because it’s there. If you’re carrying around in your head 100 billion mainframe computers, you just have to get in there and learn how to operate them.
Maxwell Maltz (New Psycho-Cybernetics)
Happiness is not the reward of virtue,” said Spinoza in his book Ethics, “but virtue itself; nor do we delight in happiness because we restrain our lusts; but, on the contrary, because we delight in it, therefore are we able to restrain them.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Our present thinking, our mental habits, our attitudes towards past experiences, and our attitudes towards the future - all have an influence upon old recorded [neuronal] engrams. The old can be changed, modified, replaced, by our present thinking.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life)
You can have many goals, but concentrating on just one at a time will help you accomplish far more than attempting to focus on many at once. Get the fire of desire started within being single-minded about one goal and the flame will naturally spread to the others without you forcing it. 4.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Finely Tuned: How to Thrive as a Highly Sensitive Person or Empath - Barrie Davenport Simplify - Joshua Becker Psycho-Cybernetics, Updated and Expanded - Maxwell Maltz, MD, FICS The Mindset of Organization - Lisa Woodruff What is your WHAT? - Steve Olsher (follow the link to get a free copy!) Better Than Before - Gretchen Rubin Books
Sarah Lentz (The Hypothyroid Writer: Seven daily habits that will heal your brain, feed your creative genius, and help you write like never before)
Remember that both behavior and feeling spring from belief. To root out the belief that is responsible for your feeling and behavior—ask yourself, “Why?” Is there some task that you would like to do, some channel in which you would like to express yourself, but you hang back feeling that “I can’t”? Ask yourself, “Why?” “Why do I believe that I can’t?” Then ask yourself, “Is this belief based on an actual fact or on an assumption—or a false conclusion?” Then ask yourself the questions: 1. Is there any rational reason for such a belief? 2. Could it be that I am mistaken in this belief? 3. Would I come to the same conclusion about some other person in a similar situation? 4. Why should I continue to act and feel as if this were true if there is no good reason to believe it?
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
If he feels bad because he is inferior, the cure is to make himself as good as everybody else, and the way to feel really good is to make himself superior. This striving for superiority gets him into more trouble, causes more frustration, and sometimes brings about a neurosis where none existed before. He becomes more miserable than ever, and “the harder he tries,” the more miserable he becomes.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
2. The self-image can be changed. Numerous case histories have shown that one is never too young or too old to change his self-image and thereby start to live a new life. One of the reasons it has seemed so difficult for a person to change his habits, his personality, or his way of life has been that heretofore nearly all efforts at change have been directed to the circumference of the self, so to speak, rather than to the center.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
It appears that in our popular thinking about happiness we have managed to get the cart before the horse. “Be good,” we say, “and you will be happy.” “I would be happy,” we say to ourselves, “if I could be successful and healthy.” “Be kind and loving to other people and you will be happy.” It might be nearer the truth if we said, “Be happy—and you will be good, more successful, healthier, feel and act more charitably toward others.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Within you, whoever you may be, regardless of how big a failure you may think yourself to be, is the ability and the power to do whatever you need to do to be happy and successful. Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you just as soon as you can change your beliefs. Just as quickly as you can dehypnotize yourself from the ideas of “I can’t,” “I’m not worthy,” “I don’t deserve it,” and other self-limiting ideas.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
There’s a book I had to read in college that I’ve just picked up again called Psycho-Cybernetics. It’s all about having the right image of yourself, the correct one. The one that you truly are, the one that wants to be successful. If you see that true image of yourself, you will grow into it. If you see a negative image, that’s what you’ll grow into. It’s time you accept that you’re made for greatness, and you need to put on your seatbelt because your life is going to be one wild ride. One amazing storybook ride.
Boo Walker (Red Mountain (Red Mountain Chronicles, #1))
The word “habit” originally meant a garment, or clothing. We still speak of riding habits, and habiliments. This gives us an insight into the true nature of habit. Our habits are literally garments worn by our personalities. They are not accidental, or happenstance. We have them because they fit us. They are consistent with our self-image and our entire personality pattern. When we consciously and deliberately develop new and better habits, our self-image tends to outgrow the old habits and grow into the new pattern.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Creative striving for a goal that is important to you as a result of your own deep-felt needs, aspirations, and talents (and not the symbols which the “Joneses” expect you to display) brings happiness as well as success because you will be functioning as you were meant to function. Man is by nature a goal-striving being. And because man is “built that way,” he is not happy unless he is functioning as he was made to function—as a goal striver. Thus true success and true happiness not only go together but each enhances the other.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
It is not knowledge of actual inferiority in skill or knowledge that gives us an inferiority complex and interferes with our living. It is the feeling of inferiority that does this. And this feeling of inferiority comes about for just one reason: We judge ourselves, and measure ourselves, not against our own “norm” or “par” but against some other individual’s “norm.” When we do this, we always, without exception, come out second best. But because we think and believe and assume that we should measure up to some other person’s “norm,” we feel miserable, and second-rate, and conclude that there is something wrong with us.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
I have found one of the most effective means of helping people achieve an adequate or successful personality is to first of all give them a graphic picture of what the successful personality looks like. Remember, the creative guidance mechanism within you is a goal-striving mechanism, and the first requisite for using it is to have a clear-cut goal or target to shoot for. A great many people want to improve themselves, and long for a better personality, but have no clear-cut idea of the direction in which improvement lies, or what constitutes a good personality. A good personality is one that enables you to deal effectively and appropriately with environment and reality, and to gain satisfaction from reaching goals that are important to you.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
One of the most pleasant thoughts to any human being is the thought that he is needed, that he is important enough and competent enough to help and add to the happiness of some other human being. However, if we make a moral issue out of happiness and conceive of it as something to be earned as a sort of reward for being unselfish, we are very apt to feel guilty about wanting happiness. Happiness comes from being and acting unselfishly—as a natural accompaniment to the being and acting, not as a “payoff” or prize. If we are rewarded for being unselfish, the next logical step is to assume that the more self-abnegating and miserable we make ourselves, the happier we will be. The premise leads to the absurd conclusion that the way to be happy is to be unhappy.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
I've spent thirty years working with the visualization techniques developed by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, author of the 30-million-copy best-seller Psycho-Cybernetics, and I use those techniques — like “Theater in Your Mind” — to visualize my letter's recipients as living, breathing, thinking, feeling, walking, talking human beings. I visualize their day's experience. How did it start out? What did they do when they first arrived at the office? Do they get their mail presorted? Opened? From an “in” basket? Hand-delivered? When do they get it? Where will they stand or sit when going through it? At that time, what else are they thinking about? Preoccupied with? What do they worry about, complain about, secretly wish for, enjoy? Through this stretch of my own imagination, I try to become one with the recipients of my letter, so I can anticipate their thoughts and reactions.
Dan S. Kennedy (The Ultimate Sales Letter: Attract New Customers. Boost your Sales.)
Then, consciously decide that throughout the day: 1. I will be as cheerful as possible. 2. I will try to feel and act a little more friendly toward other people. 3. I am going to be a little less critical and a little more tolerant of other people, their faults, failings, and mistakes. I will place the best possible interpretation on their actions. 4. Insofar as possible, I am going to act as if successes are inevitable, and I already am the sort of personality I want to be. I will practice “acting like” and “feeling like” this new personality. 5. I will not let my own opinion color facts in a pessimistic or negative way. 6. I will practice smiling at least three times during the day. 7. Regardless of what happens, I will react as calmly and as intelligently as possible. 8. I will ignore completely and close my mind to all those pessimistic and negative “facts” that I can do nothing to change.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Many people find they get better results if they imagine themselves sitting before a large motion picture screen—and imagine that they are seeing a motion picture of themselves. The important thing is to make these pictures as vivid and as detailed as possible. You want your mental pictures to approximate actual experience as much as possible. The way to do this is to pay attention to small details, sights, sounds, objects, in your imagined environment. One of my patients was using this exercise to overcome her fear of the dentist. She was unsuccessful, until she began to notice small details in her imagined picture—the smell of the antiseptic in the office, the feel of the leather on the chair arms, the sight of the dentist’s well-manicured nails as his hands approached her mouth, etc. Details of the imagined environment are all-important in this exercise, because for all practical purposes, you are creating a practice experience. And if the imagination is vivid enough and detailed enough, your imagination practice is equivalent to an actual experience insofar as your nervous system is concerned.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
A bird does not need to take lessons in nest-building. Nor does it need to take courses in navigation. Yet birds do navigate thousands of miles, sometimes over open sea. They have no newspapers or TV to give them weather reports, no books written by explorer or pioneer birds to map out for them the warm areas of the earth. Nonetheless the bird “knows” when cold weather is imminent and the exact location of a warm climate even though it may be thousands of miles away. In attempting to explain such things, we usually say that animals have certain instincts that guide them. Analyze all such instincts and you will find they assist the animal to successfully cope with its environment. In short, animals have a Success Instinct. We often overlook the fact that man, too, has a Success Instinct, much more marvelous and much more complex than that of any animal. Our Creator did not shortchange man. On the other hand, man was especially blessed in this regard. Animals cannot select their goals. Their goals (self-preservation and procreation) are preset, so to speak. And their success mechanism is limited to these built-in goal-images, which we call “instincts.” Man, on the other hand, has something animals don’t: Creative Imagination. Thus man of all creatures is more than a creature, he is also a creator. With his imagination he can formulate a variety of goals. Man alone can direct his Success Mechanism by the use of imagination, or imaging ability.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Physical relaxation, when practiced daily, brings about an accompanying mental relaxation and a relaxed attitude that enables us to better consciously control our automatic mechanism. Physical relaxation also, in itself, has a powerful influence in dehypnotizing us from negative attitudes and reaction patterns.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
The very heart of his system was his finding that effort was the one big deterrent to either breaking a bad habit or learning a new one. Making an effort to refrain from the habit actually reinforced the habit, he found. His experiments proved that the best way to break a habit is to form a clear mental image of the desired end result, and to practice without effort toward reaching that goal. Dunlap found that either “positive practice” (refraining from the habit) or “negative practice” (performing the habit consciously and voluntarily) would have beneficial effect provided the desired end result was kept constantly in mind.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
So remember you make mistakes. Mistakes don’t make you—anything.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Dr. Selye’s book written for laymen, The Stress of Life. To me, the really important thing that Dr.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
We now know that not only does the past influence the present, but that the present clearly influences the past. In other words, we are not doomed or damned by the past. Because we did have unhappy childhood experiences and traumas that left engrams behind does not mean that we are at the mercy of these engrams, or that our patterns of behavior are “set,” predetermined and unchangeable. Our present thinking, our present mental habits, our attitudes toward past experiences, and our attitudes toward the future—all have an influence upon old recorded engrams. The old can be changed, modified, replaced, by our present thinking.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Within you, whoever you may be, regardless of how big a failure you may think yourself to be, is the ability and the power to do whatever you need to do to be happy and successful. Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you just as soon as you can change your beliefs. Just as quickly as you can dehypnotize yourself from the ideas of “I can’t,” “I’m not worthy,” “I don’t deserve it” and other self-limiting ideas.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics Deluxe Edition: The Original Text of the Classic Guide to a New Life)
Set aside a period of 30 minutes each day when you can be alone and undisturbed. Relax and make yourself as comfortable as possible. Now close your eyes and exercise your imagination.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Thought is a movement of electrons and consciousness is a merely a chemical action.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics (Korean Edition))
21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
I failed once in the past, so I will probably fail in the future” is neither logical nor rational. To conclude “I can’t” in advance, without trying, and in the absence of any evidence to support the inevitability of failure, is not rational. We should be more like the man who was asked if he could play the piano. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you mean you don’t know?” he was asked. “I have never tried,” he replied.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
In his book I Can See Clearly Now, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer wrote about the influence that Psycho-Cybernetics had on his career, and it’s easy to understand why he’s so fond of saying, “There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
It was as if personality itself had a “face.” This nonphysical “face of personality” seemed to be the real key to personality change. If it remained scarred, distorted, “ugly,” or inferior, the person himself acted out this role in his behavior regardless of the changes in physical appearance. If this “face of personality” could be reconstructed, if old emotional scars could be removed, then the person himself changed, even without facial plastic surgery. Once I began to explore this area, I found more and more phenomena that confirmed the fact that the “self-image,” the individual’s mental and spiritual concept or “picture” of himself, was the real key to personality and behavior. More about this in the first chapter.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
I found most of my answers in the new science of cybernetics, which restored teleology as a respectable concept in science. It is rather strange that the new science of cybernetics grew out of the work of physicists and mathematicians rather than that of psychologists, especially when it is understood that cybernetics has to do with teleology—the goal-striving, goal-oriented behavior of mechanical systems. Cybernetics explains “what happens” and “what is necessary” in the purposeful behavior of machines
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Both experimental and clinical psychology have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Servo-mechanisms are divided into two general types: (1) where the target, goal, or answer is known and the objective is to reach it or accomplish it, and (2) where the target or answer is not known and the objective is to discover or locate it. The human brain and nervous system operate in both ways.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
A computer does not have a forebrain, nor does it have an “I.” It cannot pose problems to itself. It has no imagination and cannot set goals for itself. It cannot determine which goals are worthwhile and which are not. It has no emotions. It cannot “feel.” It works only on new data fed to it by an operator, by feedback data it secures from its own “sense organs” and from information previously stored.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Schubert is said to have told a friend that his own creative process consisted in “remembering a melody” that neither he nor anyone else had ever thought of before.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
An example of the first type is the self-guided torpedo, or the interceptor missile. The target or goal is known—an enemy ship or plane. The objective is to reach it. Such machines must “know” the target they are shooting for. They must have some sort of propulsion system that propels them forward in the general direction of the target. They must be equipped with “sense organs” (radar, sonar, heat perceptors, etc.), which bring information from the target. These “sense organs” keep the machine informed when it is on the correct course (positive feedback) and when it commits an error and gets off course (negative feedback). The machine does not react or respond to positive feedback. It is doing the correct thing already and “just keeps on doing what it is doing.” There must be a corrective device, however, that will respond to negative feedback. When negative feedback informs the mechanism that it is “off the beam,” too far to the right, the corrective mechanism automatically causes the rudder to move so that it will steer the machine back to the left. If it “overcorrects” and heads too far to the left, this mistake is made known through negative feedback, and the corrective device moves the rudder so it will steer the machine back to the right. The torpedo accomplishes its goal by going forward, making errors, and continually correcting them. By a series of zigzags it literally gropes its way to the goal. Dr. Norbert Wiener, who pioneered the development of goal-seeking mechanisms in World War II, believes that something very similar to the foregoing happens in the human nervous system whenever you perform any purposeful activity—even in such a simple goal-seeking situation as picking up a pen from a desk.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
It is characteristic of all learning that as learning takes place, correction becomes more and more refined. We see this in a person just learning to drive a car, who “overcorrects” and zigzags back and forth across the street. Once, however, a correct or “successful response” has been accomplished, it is “remembered” for future use. The automatic mechanism then duplicates this successful response on future trials. It has “learned” how to respond successfully. It forgets its failures, and repeats the successful action without any further conscious thought—that is, as a habit.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Henry J. Kaiser, the industrialist considered the father of American shipbuilding, attributed much of his success in business to the constructive, positive use of Creative Imagination with these words: “You can imagine your future.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)