Psycho Cybernetics (a video book) – 39 chapter 12/13 – off tension on performance
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Keep your mind on the outcome, where you want to be in the end. Create that mental picture whenever you are getting ready to enter a situation that makes you nervous or anxious. Produce the little movie in your mind that is successful and ends with a feeling of accomplishment.
Here’s the text from this video:
Click off Tension, Click on Performance
I was once backstage at a television talk show, chatting with the host of the program. The show’s director stuck his head in the “green room” door and said, “One minute.”
“Excuse me, Dr. Maltz,” the host said. He dosed his eyes firmly,
snapped his fingers loudly once, stood still and silent for a few seconds, snapped his fingers again, and stood silent again for a few seconds.Then he opened his. eyes, smiled, and said “Let’s go make show business magic” and walked confidently across the hallway, through the curtains and out onto the stage in front of the audience and the cameras.
After the taping was over, I asked him about what I’d observed.
“It’s my get-ready ritual,” he explained. “Early in my career, it took me twenty, even thirty minutes of hard effort to try and clear my head of everything except the show I was about to do.Gradually I learned how to do it in steps in my mind, then I was able to speed it up. Now I can do it in about 30 seconds.”
“What about the finger-snapping?” I asked.
“Those are like clicking on and off a light switch. The first snap
triggers the clearing or blanking of my mind, and now that happens just about instantly. The second click triggers a quick series of slides, pictures of me walking out to rousing applause, the audience laughing during the show, a pleasant interview with a guest, and the crew, producer and I congratulating ourselves on another great show at its end.”He smiled and added, “You see, I really did read your book years ago.”
Calmness Carries Over Too
A helpful aside to all this is that friendliness, love, peace, quiet, and calmness also “carry over.” It is impossible, as we have said, to experience or feel either fear, anger, or anxiety, while completely relaxed, quiet, and composed.
Retiring into your quiet room thus becomes an ideal clearance mechanism for emotions and moods. Old emotions evaporate and disappear. At the same time you experience calmness, peacefulness, and a feeling of well-being that will carry over into whatever activities immediately follow. Your quiet time wipes the slate clean so to speak, clears the machine, and gives you a clean new page for the environment to follow.
I practiced the quiet time both immediately before and after surgery. Surgery requires a high degree of concentration, calmness, and control. It would be disastrous to carry over into the surgical situation feelings of hurry, aggressiveness, or personal worries. Therefore, I always deliberately cleared my mental machinery by spending a few moments completely relaxed in my quiet room. On the other. hand, the high degree of concentration, purpose, and obliviousness to surroundings,
which are so necessary to the surgical situation, would be
most inappropriate to a social situation, whether the social situation be an interview in my office or a grand ball. Therefore, upon leaving surgery I also make it a point to spend a· couple of minutes in my quiet room, to clear the decks, so to speak, for a new type of action.Dr. Ira Shariip, a San Francisco surgeon, talks about running a
mental movie from initial incision to final suturing. Dr. Bodell, a hand and joint reconstructive surgeon we interviewed for a video program about Psycho-Cybernetics, told us of creating vivid, detailed mental movies of operations the evening before performing them, so that the perfect operation is installed in his mind and the performance is rote.It seems we are all using nearly identical approaches to create a carryover of calmness into the operatory.
Build Your Own Psychic Umbrellas
By practicing the techniques in this chapter you can build your own psychic umbrellas, which will screen out disturbing stimuli, bring you more peace of mind, and enable you to perform better.
Prepare your own mental tranquilizers, which can be consumed without side effects or expense. Above all, keep in mind, and hammer it home to yourself, that the key to the matter of whether you are disturbed or tranquil, fearful or composed is not the external stimulus, whatever it may be, but your own response and reaction. Your own response is what “makes” you feel fearful, anxious, insecure. If you do not respond at all, but just “let
the telephone ring,” it is impossible for you to feel disturbed, regardless of what is happening around you.You are striving to be an actor, not a reactor. Throughout this
book we have spoken of reacting and responding appropriately to
environmental factors. The human being, however, is not primarily a reactor, but an “actor.” We do not merely react and respond, willynilly, to whatever environmental factors may be present, like a ship without a captain, that goes whichever way the wind happens to blow.As goal-striving beings we first act. We set our own goal, determine our own course. Then, within the context of this goal-striving structure, we respond and react appropriately, that is, in a manner that furthers our progress and serves our own ends.
If responding and reacting to negative feedback does not take us .
farther down the road to our own goal or serve our ends, then there is no need to respond at all. And, if response of any kind gets us off course or works against us, then no response is the appropriate response.Your Emotional Stabilizer
In almost any goal-striving situation, our own inner stability is in itself an important goal to maintain. We must be sensitive to negative feed back data that advises us when we are off course, so that we can change direction and go forward. But at the same time, we must keep our own ship afloat and stable. Our ship must not be tossed and rocked and perhaps sunk by every passing wave or everi a serious storm. As Prescott Lecky expressed it, “The same attitude must be maintained in spite of environmental L:hanges.”
Our letting the teiephone ring is a mental attitude that keeps our
stability. It keeps us from being tossed about, knocked off course, or shaken up, by every wave or ripple in the environment.Stop Fighting Straw Men
Still another type of inappropriate response that causes worry, insecurity, and tension is the bad habit of trying to respond emotionally to something that doesn’t exist except in our imaginations. Not satisfied with over responding to actual minor stimuli in the actual environment, many of us create straw men in our imaginations and emotionally respond to our own mental pictures. In addition to negatives that actually exist in the environment, we impose our own negatives: This or that may happen; what if such and such happens. When we worry,
we form mental pictures, adverse mental pictures of what may exist in the environment, of what may happen. We then respond to these negative pictures as if they were present reality. Remember, your nervous system cannot tell the difference between a real experience and one that is vividly imagined.“Doing Nothing” Is the Proper Response to an Unreal Problem
Again, you can tranquilize yourself against this sort of disturbance, not by something you do, but by something you don’t do: your refusal to respond. As far as your emotions are concerned, the proper response to worry pictures is to totally igriore them. Live emotionally in the present moment. Analyze your environment, become more aware of what actually exists in your environment, and respond and react spontaneously
to that. To do this you must give all your attention to what
is happening now. You must keep your eye on the ball. Then your
response will be appropriate, and you will have no time to notice or respond to a fictitious environment.Your First Aid Kit
Carry these thoughts with you as a sort of first aid kit:
Inner disturbance, or the opposite of tranquillity, is nearly always
caused by over response, a too-sensitive alarm reaction. You create a built-in tranquilizer, or psychic screen between yourself and the disturbing stimulus, when you practice “not responding,” letting the telephone ring.You cure old habits of overresponse, you extinguish old conditioned reflexes, when you practice delaying the habitual, automatic, and unthinking response.
Relaxation is nature’s own tranquilizer. Relaxation is nonresponse. Learn physical relaxation by daily practice. Then, when you need to practice nonresponse in daily activities, just do what you’re doing when you relax.
Use the quiet room in your mind, both as a daily tranquilizer to
tone down nervous response and as a way to clear your emotional
mechanism of carry-over emotions that would be inappropriate in a new situation.Stop scaring yourself to death with your own mental pictures.
Stop fighting straw men. Emotionally, respond only to what is-here and now-and ignore the rest.MENTAL TRAINING EXERCISE
Create in your imagination a vivid mental picture of yourself sitting quietly, composed, unmoved, letting your telephone ring, as outlined earlier in this chapter. Then, in your daily activities carry over the same peaceful, composed, unmoved attitude by remembering this mental picture. Say to yourself, ”I am letting the telephone ring” whenever you are tempted to “obey” or respond to a fear-bell or anxiety-bell. Next, use your imagination to
practice nonresponse in various sorts of situations: See yourself sitting quietly and unmoved while an associate rants and raves.See yourself going through your daily tasks one by one, calmly, composed, unhurried, in spite of the pressures of a busy day. See yourself maintaining the same constant, stable course, in spite of the various hurry-bells and pressure-bells in your environment.
See yourself in various situations that have in the past upset
you; only now you remain “set,” settled, poised by not responding.CHAPTER THIRTEEN
How to Turn a Crisis into a Creative Opportunity
I have seen boys· on my baseball team go into slumps and
never come out, and I have seen others snap right out and come
back better than ever. I guess more players defeat themselves
than are ever beaten by an opposing team.
-Connie Mack“Clutch player!” “Money player!” Oh, to be able to handle all the pressure that comes your way and still perform!
I knew a young golfer who for many years held the all-time
course record for his home course, yet has never even placed in a
really big tournament. iVhen playing by himself, with friends, or in small tournaments where the stakes are low, his play is flawless. Yet each time he gets into a big tournament his game deteriorates. In the language of golfdom, “the pressure gets him.”
He is not alone in this experience.In fact, in a popular movie, Kevin Costner played the role of a
golfer known to all the professionals as “Tin Cup.” He was spectacularly skilled but, under the pressure of big money tournament play, came apart at the seams like a cheap suit in a rainstorm. Many golfers identified with tin cup. Ironically, one of the very best golf instructors and coaches I know about, who is well-known and often called on by top professionals, is unbeatable in friendly, casual, private play but has never been able to make the cut to play for real money.Many baseball pitchers have pinpoint control until they find
themselves in a situation where the chips are down. Then they choke up, lose all control, and appear to have no ability whatever Casey Stengel, famous manager of the 1950s New York Yankees, made the comment, “Anybody can hit home runs in batting practice.”On the other hand, many athletes perform better under pressure.
The situation itself seems to give them more strength, more power, more finesse. Understanding why “pressure” makes some peoples’ performance better while destroying others’ performance is key to consistently and reliably being at your best.As an aside, let me quickly remind you that the golf pro’s or baseball pitcher’s “coming apart at the seams” does not make him a lousy golfer or a worthless pitcher, does not make either of them a “choker.”
Such labels, quickly slapped on by the media, by kibitzing fans, even by cdlleagues are not only reinforcing and damaging, they are fundamentally untrue because a person is never his mistakes.
Every one of us is a mistake-maker but also potentially a mistake-breaker. We most certainly possess the capacity to rise above our mistakes. In this case, these players have not yet discovered their true selves, not yet learned how to successfully manage their self-images and servo-mechanisms so as to respond positively to pressure. While what they do not know and have not mastered does control them at the moment, it does not define them, and whether it is of days, months, or years in duration, it can be changed!
People Who Come into Their Own in a Crisis
One basketball player’s foul shot average may be significantly better during practice than regular games, and better in regular games than in playoffs, while another exhibits the reverse behavior; performance improves in a playoff, all-or-nothing situation. Almost every NFL team of note has one pass receiver who can be relied on to make a big play or extraordinarily difficult catch in the clutch, when everything depends on that play. Yet he may muff a number of easy receptions earlier in the game. Quarterbacks learn to throw to their clutch receivers when they must, and often also learn to use them minimally at other times.
One salesperson may find himself inarticulate in the presence of
an important prospect. His skills desert him. Another salesperson
under the same circumstances, may “sell over her head.” The challenge of the situation brings out abilities she does not ordinarily possess. (In our book Zero Resistance Selling, one of the most important chapters is “How To Sell When You Are in Over Your Head.”)There are students who do extremely well in day-to-day class
work, but find their minds a blank when taking an examination. There are other students who are ordinary in class work, but do extremely well on important examinations.
And with that, we will meet again next time with chapter 12,
The Secret of the Money Player
Interested in your own copy? Get it here
Start at the Beginning: Psycho Cybernetics video book
And, always keep smiling with love and light,
Nancy Holtzen
Skype: nancy.holtzen
Work With Me and the Prosperity Team – Prosperity Formula
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