Psycho Cybernetics (a video book) – 43 chapter 14 – that winning feeling
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Create Your winning feeling and let it work for you.
Here’s the text from this video:
How That Winning Feeling Made Les Giblin Successful
Les Giblin, founder of the famous Les Giblin Human Relations
Clinics and author of the book How to Have Power and Confidence in Dealing with People, read the first draft of this chapter, then told me how imagination coupled with that winning feeling had worked like magic in his own career.Les had been a successful salesperson and sales manager for years. He had done some public relations work and had gained some degree of reputation as an expert in the field of human relations. He liked his work but he wanted to broaden his field. His big interest was people, and after years of study, both theoretical and practical, he thought he had some answers to the problems people often have with other people.
He wanted to lecture on human relations. However, his one big obstacle was lack of experience in public speaking. Les told me:
One night, I was lying in bed thinking of my one big desire. The only experience I had had as a public speaker was addressing small groups of my own salesmen iIi sales meetings, and a little experience I had had in the Army when I served part-time as an instructor. The very thought of getting up before a big audience scared the wits out of me. I just couldn’t imagine myself doing it successfully. Yet, I could tal,k to my own salesmen with the greatest of ease. I had been able to talk to groups of soldiers without any trouble. Lying there in bed, I recaptured in memory the feeling of success and confidence I had had in talking to these small groups.I remembered all the little incidental details that had accompanied my feeling of poise. Then, in my imagination I pictured myself standing before a huge audience and making a talk on human relations-and at the same time having the same feeling of poise and self-confidence I had had with smaller groups. I pictured to myself in detail just how I would stand.
I could feel the pressure of my feet on the floor, I could see the expressions on the people’s faces, and I could hear their applause. I saw myself making a talk successfully-going over with a bang.
Something seemed to click in my mind. I felt elated. Right at that moment I felt that I could do it. I had welded the feeling of confidence and success from the past to the picture in my imagination of my career in the future. My feeling of success was so real that I knew right then I could do it. I got what you call ‘that winning feeling’ and it has never deserted me. Although there seemed to be no door open to me at the time, and the dream seemed impossible, in less than three years time I saw my dream come true-almost in exact detail as I had imagined it and felt it.Because of the fact that I was relatively unknown and because of my lack of experience, no major booking agency wanted me. This didn’t deter me. I booked myself, and still do. I have more opportunities for speaking engagements than I can fill.
Les Giblin became known as an authority on human relations.
Over two hundred ‘of the largest corporations in America have paid him thousands of dollars to conduct human relations clinics for their employees. His book How to Have Confidence and Power has become a classic in the field. And it all started with a picture in his imagination and that winning feeling.Les’ experience demonstra.tes how we must search our past experiences for signs that the goal we are now tentatively imagining can be achieved. Those signs are almost always there, or the goal would never have occurred to us in· the first place. You undoubtedly have “little” past indications that you can do what it is you would most like to do, and if you will look for them and highlight them in your mind, you can begin proving to your self-image that you are in fact qualified to be as you desire to be, secure its acceptance of this as new truth, and send your servo-mechanism hurrying to make it so.
When you shine your spotlight on these Can-Do Indicators and consign everything else to the shadows, your winning feeling will be reflected back and envelope you in its warmth.
Two Men, Two Different Feelings
I once had occasion to observe two men I knew quite well. They had remarkably similar backgrounds, education, intelligence, and skill, both attempting to master a brand new endeavor at the same time. Each was totally unknown to the other, but both observed by me. The details of the task being undertaken are unimportant. Suffice it to say it represented considerable difficulty, offered up considerable frustration, and required considerable patience.
One of these men said to me, “I’ll never get this. You know, Max, all my life, everything’s been difficult for me. I’ve had to do everything the hard way. I can’t recall ever getting a break. I just don’t have it in me to fight my way through this too.”
The other fellow said to me, “Max, I’ll tell you something. All my life, everything’s been difficult for me. Every single thing I now do well, every single thing I can now do effortlessly, and every success I’ve had, I started out doing it badly and struggled mightily to get from bad to. good. If there’s one thing I know exactly how to do, it is to go from being a bumbling incompetent to capable. Looks like I’m going to do that again with this.”
Which one of these men do you suppose gave up on this goal and walked away empty-handed and unfulfilled? Which do you suppose wound up successful?This is more than just the old cliche about positive thinkingglass half full versus glass half empty. That’s superficial and tends to be consciously forced. This is deeper. Foundational. Right there, in the self-image. How these two men have interpreted their lives, how they feel about themselves. One will see the slightest improvement as encouraging proof that he is again progressing as usual, from ineptness to competence, while the other will see the exact same slight improvement as proof that he is mired in struggle so great and challenge so unyielding he is not up to the task.
Any two people can look at any situation and interpret it quite differently. That’s why we have Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, right-to-life activists and pro-choice activists, and so on. There’s room for differences of opinion about you too! If you hold an opinion about yourself that is limiting and inhibiting, try to step out and examine yourself as an outside analyst, then advocate the opposing opinion. The most adept debators can take either side of any argument and win. Try it!
How Science Explains That Winning Feeling
The science of Cybernetics throws new light on just how the winning feeling operates. We have previously shown how electronic servomechanisms make use of stored data, comparable to human memory, to “remember” successful actions and repeat them.
Skill learning is largely a matter of trial-and-error prac,tice until a number of hits, or successful actions, have registered in memory. Cybernetic scientists have built what they call an electronic mouse, which can learn its way through a maze. The first time through the mouse makes numerous errors. Itconstantly bumps into walls and obstructions. But each time it bumps into an obstruction, it turns 90 degrees and tries again. If it runs into another wall, it makes another turn, and goes forward again. Eventually, after many, many errors, stops and turns, the mouse gets through the open space in the maze. The electronic mouse, however, remembers the successful turns and, the next time through, these successful motions are reproduced, or played back, and the mouse goes through the open space quickly and efficiently.
The object of practice is to make repeated trials, constantly correct errors, until a hit is scored. When a successful pattern of action is performed, the entire action pattern from beginning to end is not only stored in what we call conscious memory, but in our very nerves and tissues. Folk language can be very intuitive and descriptive. When we say, “I had a feeling in my bones that 1 could do it,” we are not far from right. When Dr. Cary Middlecoff says, “There was something about the way I felt that gave me a line to the cup just as clearly as if it had been tattooed on my brain,” he is, perhaps unknowingly, very aptly describing the latest scientific concept of just what happens in the human mind when we learn, remember, or imagine.
How Your Brain Records Success and Failure
Much research in the workings of the brain has taken place since I wrote the original Psycho-Cybernetics · book. But this explanation, condensed from it, remains helpful in understanding how the winning feeling (or failure feeling) comes about: The human cortex is composed of billions of neurons, each with numerous axons (feelers or extension wires), which form synapses (electrical. connections) between the neurons. When we think, remember, or imagine, these neurons discharge an electrical current that can be measured. When we learn something or experience something, a pattern of neurons forming a “chain” (or tattooing of a pattern) isset up in brain tissue.
This pattern is not in the nature of a physical groove, like a groove in a record (although that analogy is not far off the mark), but more in the nature of an electrical track, the arrangement and electrical connections between various neurons being somewhat similar to a magnetic pattern recorded on a CD. The same neuron may thus be a part of any number of separate and distinct patterns, making the human brain’s capacity to learn and remember almost limitless.
These patterns, 01′ engrams, are stored away in brain tissue for future use and are reactivated, or replayed, whenever we remember a past experience.
In short, there is a tattooing, or action pattern of engrams, in your brain for every successful action you have ever performed in the past. And, if you can somehow furnish the spark to bring that action pattern into life, or replay it, it will execute itself, and all you’ll have to do is “swing the clubs” and “let nature take its course.”
When you reactivate successful action patterns out of the past, you also reactivate the winning feeling that accompanied them. By the same token, if you can recapture that winning feeling, you also evoke all the winning actions that accompanied it. View this as a circular process: Feeling begets action, action begets feeling or imagined action, especially memory-based imagined action begets feeling, feeling begets action. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter much where in that loop you strike the spark.
Build Success Patterns into Your Gray Matter
Dr. Elliott, when President of Harvard, once made a speech on what he called “The Habit of Success.” Many failures in elementary schools, he said, were due to the fact that students were not given at the very beginning a sufficient amount of work at which they could succeed, and thus never had an opportunity to develop the “Atmosphere of Success,” or what we call the winning feeling. Students, he said, who had never experienced success early in their school life, had no chance to develop the “habit of success,” the habitual feeling of faith and confidence in undertaking new work. He urged that teachers arrange work in the early grades so as to ensure that students experienced success. The work should be well within the ability of the student, yet interesting enough to arouse enthusiasm and motivation. These small successes, said Dr. Elliott, would give students the “feel of success,” which would be a valuable ally in all future undertakings.
When a quarterback is injured and removed from the game, and the second stringer who’s been warming the bench is rushed in, the astute coach tries to give him easy plays with a high probability of success, even if small, in order to establish a sense of success, a rhythmto spark that winning feeling. Rather than having him attempt a pass down field or over the middle that might result in a gain of 10, 20, or 30 yards but is difficult to complete, the play might be a little swing pass, almost sideways, that may result in a gain of only 2 or 3 yards but has a very high probability of being successfully completed.
A top salesman I know in the printing industry habitually arranges his schedule so that his first two sales calls of each day are in ”friendly territory:” He visits clients where he knows he will be welcomed, where he w~ites business repetitively, where there is a high likelihood of being asked to bid a job or even immediately take an order or, at the very least, he’ll be treated respectfully and courteously.
Then he moves on to cold calling on possible new accounts where the welcome may not be nearly as warm, or visiting the tough customers who are ultra-price-conscious, where he is frequently outbid. He tells me he wants a winning feeling already in place before testing his patience and persistence. His sales manager says, “Small victories lead to big victories.”
Fred DeLuca, the founder of the Subway sandwich shop chain, a champion of micro business launches, counsels, “Make pennies first.” It is easier to envision making dollars if you’ve made pennies, easier to envision making. thousands if you’ve made hundreds.
What you might call the small victory process is the natural evolution of things. Crawl. Stand by holding onto something. Stand independently. Toddle forward by holding onto something. Walk.
Having mastered walking, it’s a bit easier to believe you can ride a bicycle. Having ridden a bicycle, it’s easier to picture yourself riding a motorcycle.
We can acquire the habit of success or rhythm of success, we can build into our gray matter patterns and feelings of success at any time and at any age by following Dr. Elliott’s advice to teachers, the savvy coach’s strategy for the inexperienced quarterback, the printing sales rep’s trick for starting each day. If we are habitually frustrated by failure, we are very apt to acquire habitual feelings of failure, which color all new undertakings. But by arranging things so that we can succeed in little things, we can build an atmosphere of success that will carry over into larger undertakings. We can gradually undertake more difficult tasks, and after succeeding in them, be in a position to undertake something even more challenging. Success is literally built on success and there is much truth in the saying, “Nothing succeeds like success.”
Obviously, as adults we are eager· to speed , up this process. To accelerate success. To have such a good foundation in place we can even trigger our winning feeling on command. The experienced quarterback who has been parked on the bench for weeks needs and wants to turn on his winning feeling in an instant, when’ suddenly needed in a game, without requiring the gentle, patient build-up of small victories.
This acceleration must be created totally through imagination, not actuality. In the Theater Of The Mind rather than the arena of real experience. Because synthetic and actual experience have virtually identical impact, this can be done.
And with that, we will meet again next time with chapter 14,
How to Play Back Your Own Built-In Success Patterns
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And, always keep smiling with love and light,
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