Your Erroneous Zones Quotes

Acceptance means no complaining, and happiness means no complaining about the things over which you can do nothing.

Feelings are not just emotions that happen to you. Feelings are reactions you choose to have.

The essence of greatness is the ability to choose personal fulfillment in circumstances where others choose madness.

Love is a word that has as many definitions as there are people to define it. Try this one on for size. The ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves, without any insistence that they satisfy you.

You are not necessarily what you say. Behavior is a much better barometer of what you are than words. What you do in your present moments is the only indicator of what you are as a person.

Syllogism ― Major premise: I can control my thoughts. Minor premise: My feelings come from my thoughts. Conclusion: I can control my feelings.

There are two days in the week about which and upon which I never worry. Two carefree days, kept sacredly free from fear and apprehension. One of these days is yesterday…and the other day I do not worry about is tomorrow.

Once you can change your thoughts, your new feelings will begin to emerge, and you will have taken the first step on the road to your personal freedom.

A truer barometer of intelligence is an effective, happy life lived each day and each present moment of every day.

This road will be new because you will see a given emotion as a choice rather than a condition of life.

Sören Kierkegaard wrote, “Once you label me, you negate me.” When the individual must live up to the label, the self ceases to exist. The same is true of self-labels. You could be negating yourself by identifying with your trademarks, rather than your own potential for growth.

There are two occasions when complaining is least appreciated in the world: (1) Whenever you tell someone else that you are tired. (2) Whenever you tell someone else that you don’t feel well. If you are tired, you can exercise several options, but complaining to even one poor soul, let alone a loved one, is abusing that person. And it won’t make you less tired. The same kind of logic applies to your “not feeling well.

Self-worth cannot be verified by others. You are worthy because you say it is so. If you depend on others for your value it is other-worth.

A relationship based on love, as was said earlier, is one in which each partner allows the other to be what he chooses, with no expectations and no demands.

It is easy to be a critic, but being a doer requires effort, risk and change.

Remind yourself that what other people do is not what bothers you, it’s your reaction to it. Instead of saying “They shouldn’t do that,” say, “I wonder why I bother myself with what they are doing.

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a fact, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system,” wrote Dr. Wayne W. Dyer in Your Erroneous Zones.2

Your worth is determined by you, and with no need for an explanation to anyone. And your worthiness, a given, has nothing to do with your behavior and feelings. You may not like your behavior in a given instance, but that has nothing to do with your self-worth. You can choose to be worthy to yourself forever, and then get on with the task of working on your self-images.

Nothing is more important than anything else. The child collecting seashells is not doing something more right or wrong than the President of General Motors making a major corporate decision. They are different. Nothing more!

Here is the guts of both self-and other-directed love. Never confuse your self-worth (which is a given) with your behavior, or the behavior of others toward you.

Instead of hating yourself, develop positive feelings. Learn from the error, and resolve not to repeat it but don’t associate it with your self-worth.

You can paralyze yourself with perfectionistic do-your-best nonsense.

Give up having to have a reason for everything you do. When someone asks you why, remember that you don’t have to come up with a reasonable answer that will satisfy them. You can do what you decide just because you want to.

Não é a injustiça que conta, é o que você faz a respeito dela.

Needing approval is tantamount to saying, "Your view of me is more important than my own opinion of myself.

If your life is better, it is because you have done something constructive to make it better.

It’s easy to use the label as justification for remaining the same. Sören Kierkegaard wrote, “Once you label me, you negate me.” When the individual must live up to the label,

The ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves, without any insistence that they satisfy you.

Guilt is the most useless of all erroneous zone behaviors. It is by far the greatest waste of emotional energy. Why? Because, by definition, you are feeling immobilized in the present over something that has already taken place, and no amount of guilt can ever change history.

Frequently avoidance of the present leads to idealization of the future... When an event does not live up to your expectations you can get out of the depression by idealizing again. Do not let this vicious circle become your life-style. Interrupt it now with some strategic present-moment fulfillment.

There is nothing to worry about! Absolutely nothing. You can spend the rest of your life, beginning right now, worrying about the future, and no amount of your worry will change a thing. Remember that worry is defined as being immobilized in the present as a result of things that are going or not going to happen in the future. You must be careful not to confuse worrying with planning for the future.

A lei não decide se a coisa é errada, apenas se é legal.

Amor:capacidade e disposição para permitir que aqueles que você ama façam suas próprias escolhas, sem insistir que satisfaçam a você.

Rather than helping children to think for themselves, solve their own problems and develop trust in themselves, parents tend to treat children as possessions.

They want to be victorious and effective on their own, rather than gaining through the shortcomings of others.

Deixe de procurar uma resposta numa existência de regras e tradições. Entoe seu próprio cântico de felicidade da maneira que você escolher, sem pensar em como se esperaria que ele fosse.

Begin to view the past as something that can never be changed, despite how you feel about it. It’s over! And any guilt that you choose will not make the past different. Emblazon this sentence on your consciousness. “My feeling guilty will not change the past, nor will it make me a better person.” This sort of thinking will help you to differentiate guilt from learning as a result of your past.

Even if you are deliberately avoiding dominant people (parent, spouse, boss, child), you are still being controlled by them in their absence if you are experiencing emotional immobilization because of them.

Lembre-se que o que incomoda você não é o que as outras pessoas fazem, e sim sua reação a isso. Em vez de dizer "Eles deviam fazer isso", diga: "Queria saber por que me incomodo com o que eles estão fazendo.

Guilt is not merely a concern with the past; it is a present-moment immobilization about a past event. And the degree of immobilization can run from mild upset to severe depression. If you are simply learning from your past, and vowing to avoid the repetition of some specific behavior, this is not guilt. You experience guilt only when you are prevented from taking action now as a result of having behaved in a certain way previously. Learning from your mistakes is healthy and a necessary part of growth. Guilt is unhealthy because you are ineffectively using up your energy in the present feeling hurt, upset and depressed about a historical happening. And it’s futile as well as unhealthy. No amount of guilt can ever undo anything.

You can have all visits back home be fond experiences, if you get a firm handle on your own struggle for independence from your parents. And if you model self-pride and self-worth for your children, they will in turn leave the nest with an absence of stress and turmoil for all concerned.

The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics, why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics until it is time to learn to plough.”*

worrying about people and problems doesn’t help. It doesn’t solve problems, it doesn’t help other people, and it doesn’t help us. It is wasted energy. “If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a fact, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system,” wrote Dr. Wayne W. Dyer in Your Erroneous Zones.2 Worrying and obsessing keep us so tangled in our heads we can’t solve our problems. Whenever we become attached in these ways to someone or something, we become detached from ourselves. We lose touch with ourselves. We forfeit our power and ability to think, feel, act, and take care of ourselves. We lose control.

Keep in mind that you have no responsibility to make others happy. Others make themselves happy. Thus, you may truly enjoy the company of another, but if you feel it is your mission to make them happy, then you are a dependent who will also feel gloom when the other person is down. Or even worse, you’ll feel as though you let him down. You are responsible for your own emotions and so is everyone else. No one has control over your feelings, except you.

Carlos Castaneda calls a man of knowledge one who— “Lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting...He knows that his life will be over altogether too soon; he knows, because he sees, that nothing is more important than anything else.... Thus a man of knowledge sweats and puffs and if one looks at him he is just like any ordinary man, except that the folly of his life is under control. Nothing being more important than anything else, a man of knowledge chooses any act, and acts it out as if it mattered to him. His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn’t; so when he fulfills his acts he retreats in peace, and whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn’t, is in no way any part of his concern.

Você pode ficar sentado o resto da vida, lamentando-se sobre o quanto foi mau, sentindo-se culpado até morrer, e nem um minúsculo fragmento dessa culpa irá contribuir de maneira nenhuma para corrigir esse antigo comportamento.

Se você faz algo, seja lá o que for,e não gosta do fato em si, ou de você mesmo por tê-lo feito, pode jurar que eliminará tal comportamento voluntariamento, no futuro. Mas experimentar uma sentença de culpa autoimposta é uma viagem neurótica que você pode precisar fazer. A culpa não ajuda. Não só mantém você imobilizado, mas também estimula as oportunidades de que venha a repetir o comportamento indesejável.

O ciúme é, na realidade, a exigência de que alguém o ame de determinada maneira, com você dizendo "Isso não é justo" quando isso não acontece. Deriva de uma falta de confiança em si, simplesmente porque é uma atividade dirigida de outra pessoa. Permite que o comportamento dos outros seja a causa de seu desconforto emocional. As pessoas que realmente gostam de si mesmas não escolhem ter ciúmes, nem permitem a si próprias serem perturbadas quando alguém mais não age com justiça.

Amar a si mesmo significa aceitar-se como alguém que tem valor porque decidiu ter valor.

Toda questão de amar, dar e receber tem por base um eu que é plenamente amado.

Nunca confunda seu próprio valor (que é um dado) com seu comportamento ou com o comportamento dos outros em relação a você.

O verdadeiro barômetro da inteligência é uma vida produtiva, feliz, vivida a cada dia e cada momento presente de todo dia.

Dar amor aos outros tem relação direta como grau de amor que você tem por si próprio.

Lembre-se de que a vingança é apenas uma outra maneira de ser controlado pelos outros. Faça o que você, não eles, decidir que deve fazer.

A concessão de aprovação pode ser um grande manipulador. Seu valor reside nos outros, e se eles recusam dar-lhe aprovação, você não tem nada. Não tem valor. E assim a coisa vai, quanto mais lisonja lhe é necessária, mais você pode ser manipulado pelos outros.

Tenha em mente que: (1)alguém sempre pode escolher outra pessoa sem que isso se reflita em você; (2)quer você seja ou não escolhido por alguém importante, não é com isso que você deve medir seu valor. (...)Se essa pessoa preferir outro a você, tal escolha refletirá o outro e não você.

The next time you are contemplating a decision in which you are debating whether or not to take charge of yourself, to make your own choice, ask yourself an important question, "How long am I going to be dead?" With that eternal perspective, you can now make your own choice and leave the worrying, the fears, the question of whether you can afford it and the guilt to those who are going to be alive forever.

Those who recognize problems as a human condition and don't measure happiness by an absence of problems are the most intelligent kind of humans we know; also, the most rare.

Once you learn that you can feel what you choose to feel, you will be on the road to "intelligence"—a road where there are no bypaths that lead to [Nervous Break Downs]

Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy, but this is not accurate. You make yourself unhappy because of the thoughts that you have about the people or things in your life. Becoming a free and healthy person involves learning to think differently.

You are the person responsible for how you feel. You feel what you think, and you can learn to think differently about anything—if you decide to do so.

Seize the present moment as the only one you have. And remember, wishing, hoping, and regretting are the most common and dangerous tactics for evading the present.

You can be motivated out of a desire to grow rather than a need to repair your deficiencies. If you recognize that you can always grow, improve, become more and greater, that is enough.

You may have a social disease, one that will not go away with a simple injection. You are quite possibly infected with the sepsis of low-esteem, and the only known cure is a massive dose of self-love.

Once you recognize just how good you are, you won’t have to have others reinforce your value or values by making their behavior conform to your dictates. If you’re secure in yourself, you neither want nor need others to be like you. For one thing, you’re unique. For another, that would rob them of their own uniqueness, and what you love in them are just those traits that make them special and separate. It begins to fit. You get good at loving yourself, and suddenly you’re able to love others, to give to others, and do for others by giving and doing for yourself first. Then there are no gimmicks to your giving. You’re not doing it for the thanks or the payoffs but because of the genuine pleasure you get from being a helper or a lover.

The logic of being able to choose your self-pictures applies to all of the photographs of you that are lodged in your brain. You are as socially adept as you choose to be. If you dislike the way you behave socially, you can work at changing the behavior and not confusing it with your own self-worth.

Eliminate jealousy by recognizing it is a put-down of yourself. By comparing yourself to some other person and imagining you are loved less, you make others more important than you. You are measuring your own merit in comparison to another. Remind yourself that (1) Someone can always choose another without having it be a reflection on you, and (2) whether or not you are chosen by any significant other is not the way you validate your own self-worth.

Knowing that you’ll always get some disapproval for everything you feel, think, say or do is the way out of the tunnel of despair. Once you expect it, you won’t be inclined to hurt yourself with it, and you’ll simultaneously stop equating the repudiation of an idea or a feeling with the repudiation of you.

You may also believe that you must have a reason for doing something; otherwise what’s the point of doing it? Balderdash! You can do anything you want just because you want to, and for no other reason. You don’t need a reason for anything that you do. Looking for a reason for everything is the kind of thinking that keeps you from new and exciting experiences...This passion for reasons keeps you from opening up and growing. What freedom to know that you don’t have to justify anything to anyone, including yourself, ever again.

And you, dear reader, have you really lived 10,000 or more days or have you lived one day, 10,000 or more times? A good question to ask yourself as you work toward more spontaneity in your life.

Being spontaneous means eliminating your prejudgments and allowing yourself to meet and deal with new people and ideas. The prejudgments themselves are a safety valve for avoiding murky or puzzling provinces and preventing growth. If you don’t trust anyone you can’t get a “handle on”; it really means you don’t trust yourself on unfamiliar grounds.

Things can break down, a depression can wipe out your money, your house can be repossessed, but you, you can be a rock of self-esteem.

There may, however, be occasions when you will fail in some given task according to your own standards. The important thing here is not to equate the act with your own self-worth. Not to succeed in a particular endeavor is not to fail as a person. It is simply not being successful with that particular trial at that particular present moment.

Remind yourself that the fear of failure is very often the fear of someone else’s disapproval or ridicule. If you let them have their own opinions, which have nothing to do with you, you can begin to evaluate your behavior in your own, rather than their terms. You’ll come to see your abilities not as better or worse, but as simply different from others.

All the great heroes of your life have taught you nothing. And they are no better than you, in any way. Politicians, actors, athletes, rock-stars, your boss, therapist, teacher, spouse, or whoever, are just skillful at what they do—nothing more.

You are behaving as a fool if you look outside of you for an explanation of how you should feel or what you should do. Taking credit as well as responsibility for yourself is the first step to eliminating this erroneous zone. Be your own hero.

This may be a part of your tendency to dichotomize, or to divide the world neatly into extremes such as black/white, yes/no, good/bad and right/wrong. Few things fit neatly into those categories and most intelligent folks roam around in those gray areas, rarely coming to rest on either black or white. This proclivity for being right is most clearly evidenced in marriage and other adult relationships. Discussions inevitably become a contest which results in one partner being right, and the other wrong. You hear it all the time. “You always think you’re right,” and, “You’ll never admit you’re wrong.” But there is no right and wrong here. People are different and they see things from different perspectives.

All rights and wrongs of every description represent shoulds of one kind or another. And the shoulds get in your way, particularly when they conflict with another person’s need to have his own as well.

Who decides the rightness? That is the question that can never be answered satisfactorily. The law doesn’t decide if it’s wrong, only if it’s legal.

You can choose how you’ll introduce people, what you’ll tip, what you’ll wear, how you’ll speak, where you’ll sit, how you’ll eat, and so on, strictly on the basis of what you want. Anytime you fall into the trap of “What should I wear,” or “How should I do it,” you’re giving up a chunk of yourself. I’m not making a case here for being a social rebel since that would be a form of approval-seeking through nonconformity, but rather this is a plea for being self-rather than other-directed in the everyday running of your life. Being true to yourself means being devoid of the need for an external support system.

There is no percentage in rebelling just for the sake of rebelling, but there are great rewards in being your own person and living your life according to your own standards.

You do not have to be always as your culture expects you to be. If you are, and feel an inability to be otherwise; you are indeed a follower, one of a flock who allows others to determine his course. Leading your own life involves flexibility and repeated personal assessments of how well the rule works at a particular present moment. True, it’s often easier to follow, to blindly do as you’re told, but once you recognize that the law is there to serve you, not to make you a servant, you can begin to eliminate that musterbation behavior. If you’re going to learn to resist enculturation, you’ll have to become a shrugger. Others will still choose to obey even if it hurts them, and you will have to learn to allow them their choice. No anger, only your own convictions.

Resisting enculturation means making decisions for yourself and carrying them out as efficiently and quietly as possible. No bandwagons or hostile demonstrations where they will do no good. The foolish rules, traditions and policies will never go away, but you don’t have to be a part of them. Just shrug as others go through their sheep motions. If they want to behave that way, fine for them but that’s not for you. To make a big fuss is almost always the surest way to incur wrath and create more obstacles for yourself.

Stop waiting for others to change. Ask yourself why others should be different simply because you would like it better if they were. Recognize that every person has a right to be whatever they choose, even if you irritate yourself about it.

Decide that any and all unhappiness that you choose will never be the result of someone else, but rather that it will be the result of you and your own behavior. Remind yourself constantly that any externally caused unhappiness reinforces your own slavery, since it assumes that you have no control over yourself or them, but they have control over you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in Literary Ethics in 1838, "Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning anecdote, all flock to their aid." What a beautiful thought. Stay with tradition and you ensure that you’ll always be the same, but toss it aside, and the world is yours to use as creatively as you choose.

We are conditioned to look for justice in life and when it doesn’t appear, we tend to feel anger, anxiety or frustration. Actually, it would be equally productive to search for the fountain of youth, or some such myth. Justice does not exist. It never has, and it never will. The world is simply not put together that way. Robins eat worms. That’s not fair to the worms. Spiders eat flies. That’s not fair to the flies. Cougars kill coyotes. Coyotes kill badgers. Badgers kill mice. Mice kill bugs. Bugs...You have only to look at nature to realize there is no justice in the world. Tornadoes, floods, tidal waves, draughts are all unfair. It is a mythological concept, this justice business. The world and the people in it go on being unfair every day. You can choose to be happy or unhappy, but it has nothing to do with the lack of justice you see around you.

Your mind-set goes something like this: “If they can do it, so can I.” “It’s not fair for you to have more than I.” “But I didn’t get to do that, why should you?” On and on they go. In this case you’re determining what is good for you on the basis of someone else’s conduct. They, not you, are in charge of your emotions. If you are upset because of not being able to do something that someone else has done, then you’ve given them control over you. Whenever you compare yourself to anyone else, you are playing the “It’s not fair” game, and shifting from self-reliance to other-directed external thinking.

Instead of thinking of anything as being unfair, you can decide what you really want, and then set about devising strategies for attaining it, independent of what anyone else in the world wants or does. The simple facts are that everyone is different, and no amount of your bitching about others having it better than you will bring about any positive self-changes.

The backdrop for virtually all neurosis is making others’ behavior more significant than your own.

John Dryden called jealousy “the jaundice of the soul.” If your jealousy gets in your way, and creates any amount of emotional immobility, then you can set as a goal the elimination of this wasteful thinking. Jealousy is really a demand that someone love you in a certain way, and you saying “It isn’t fair” when they don’t. It comes from a lack of self-confidence, simply because it is an other-directed activity. It allows their behavior to be the cause of your emotional discomfort. People who really like themselves don’t choose jealousy or allow themselves to be distraught when someone else doesn’t play fair. You can never predict how someone you love will react to another human being, but if they choose to be affectionate or loving you can only experience the immobility of jealousy if you see their decisions as having anything to do with you. That is your choice. If a partner loves another, he isn’t being “unfair,” he is simply being.

Begin to view your emotional life as independent of whatever anyone else does. This will free you from the chains of being hurt when others behave differently from the way you want them to.

Replace the sentence “It isn’t fair” with “It’s unfortunate,” or “I’d prefer...” Thus, instead of insisting that the world be other than it is, you begin to accept reality—but not necessarily to approve of it.

There you have the deferrer’s delight. As long as you say maybe, or hope, or wish, you can use these as a rationale for not doing anything now. All wishing and hoping are a waste of time—the folly of fairyland residents.

Think of yourself as too significant to live with anxiety about the things you have to do. So, the next time you know you are uncomfortable with postponement anxiety, remember that people who love themselves don’t hurt themselves that way.

As long as you feel that you have to do anything because it is expected of you in a particular relationship, and your doing it creates any resentment or your not doing it any guilt, you can count yourself as having work to do in this erroneous zone.

With two self-reliant people, who care enough about each other to foster independence rather than dependence, but at the same time share happiness with a loved person, marriage can be an exciting prospect. But, when two people try to merge into oneness, or one tries to dominate the other in any way, that spark that is within us all fights for one of the greatest human needs, independence.

Recognize your desire for privacy and not having to share everything you feel and experience with someone. You are unique and private. If you feel you must share everything then you are without choice, and of course, a dependent.

Anger is not “only human.” You do not have to possess it, and it serves no purpose that has anything to do with being a happy, fulfilled person. It is an erroneous zone, a kind of psychological influenza that incapacitates you just as a physical disease would. Let’s define the term anger. As used in this chapter, it refers to an immobilizing reaction, experienced when any expectancy is not met. It takes the form of rage, hostility, striking out at someone or even glowering silence. It is not simple annoyance or irritation. Once again the key word is immobility. Anger is immobilizing and it is usually a result of wishing the world and the people in it were different. Anger is a choice, as well as a habit. It is a learned reaction to frustration, in which you behave in ways that you would rather not. In fact, severe anger is a form of insanity. You are insane whenever you are not in control of your behavior. Therefore, when you are angry and out of control, you are temporarily insane.

Don’t try to delude yourself into believing that you enjoy something that you find distasteful. You can dislike something and still not have to be angry about it.