Psycho Cybernetics (a video book) – 44 chapter 14 – built in success formula
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
One step at a time! You will succeed
Here’s the text from this video:
How to Play Back Your Own Built-In Success Patterns
Everyone has at some time or another been successful in the past. It does not have to have been a big success. It might have been something as unimportant as standing up to the school bully and beating him; winning a race in grammar school, winning the sack race at the office picnic, winning out over a teenage rival for the affections of a girlfriend.
Or it might be the memory of a successful sale, your most successful business deal, or winning first prize for the best cake at the county fair. What you succeeded in is not so important as the feeling of success that attended it. All you need is an experience where you succeeded in doing what you wanted to, in achieving what you set out to achieve, and something that brought you some feeling of satisfaction.
Go back in memory and relive those successful experiences. In your imagination revive the entire picture in as much detail as you can. In your mind’s eye, see not only the main event but all the little incidental things that accompanied your success. What sounds were there? What about your environment? What else was happening around you at the time? What objects were present? What time of year was it? Were you cold or hot? And so forth. The more detailed you can make it, the better. If you can remember in sufficient detail just what happened when you were successful at some time in the past, you will find yourself feeling just as you felt then. Try particularly to remember your feelings at the time. If you can remember your feelings from the past, they will be reactivated in the present. You will find yourself feeling self-confident, because self-confidence is built on memories of past successes.
Now, after arousing this general feeling of success, apply it in your thoughts to the important sale, conference, speech, business, golf tournament, rodeo competition, whatever you are engaged in now. Use your -creative imagination to picture to yourself just how you would act and just how you would feel if you had already succeeded.
Positive and Constructive Worry
Mentally, begin to play with the idea of complete and inevitable success. Don’t force yourself. Don’t attempt to coerce your mind, try to use effort or willpower to bring about the desired conviction.
Just do what you do when you worry, only “worry” about a positive goal and a desirable outcome, rather than about a negative goal and an undesirable outcome.
Don’t begin by trying to force yourself to have absolute faith in the desired success. This is too big a bite for you to mentally digest at first. Use “gradualness.” Begin to think about the desired end result as you do when you worry about the future. When you worry, you do not attempt to convince yourself that the outcome will be undesirable.
Instead, you begin gradually. You usually begin with “suppose.” “Just suppose such and such a thing happens,” you mentally say to yourself. You repeat this idea over and over to yourself. You play with it. Next . comes the idea of possibility. “Well, after all,” you say, “such a thing is possible.” It could happen. Next, comes mental imagery. You begin to picture to yourself all the various negative possibilities. You play these imaginative pictures over and over to yourself, adding small details and refinements. As the pictures become more and more real to you, appropriate feelings begin to manifest themselves, just as if the imagined outcome had already happened. And this is the way that fear and anxiety develop.
How to Cultivate Faith and Courage
Faith and courage are developed in exactly the same way. Only your goals are different. If you are going to spend time in worry, why not worry constructively? Begin by outlining and defining to yourself the most desirable possible outcome. Begin with your “suppose.”
“Suppose the best possible outcome did actually come about?” Next, remind yourself that after all this could .happen. Not that it will happen, at this stage, but only that it could. Remind yourself that, after all, such a good and desirable outcome is possible.
You can mentally accept and digest these gradual doses of optimism and faith. After having thought of the desired end result as a definite possibility, begin to imagine what the desirable outcome would be like. Go over these mental pictures and delineate details and refinements.
Play them over and over to yourself. As your mental images become more detailed, as they are repeated ‘over and over again, you will find that more appropriate feelings are beginning to manifest themselves, just as if the favorable outcome had already happened. This time the appropriate feelings will be those of faith, self-confidence, courage-or all of them wrapped up into one package, That Winning Feeling.
Don’t Take Counsel of Your Fears
General George Patton, the hell-for-leather, “Old Blood and Guts”
general of World War II fame, was once asked if he ever experienced fear before a battle. Yes, he said, he often experienced fear just before an important engagement and sometimes during a battle, but, he added, “I never take counsel of my fears.”If you experience negative failure feelings-fear and anxietybefore an important undertaking, as everyone does from time to time, it should not be taken as a sure sign that you will fail. It all depends on how you react to them and what attitude you take toward them. If you listen to them, obey them, and’take counsel of them, you will probably perform badly. But this need not be true.
First of all, it is important to understand that failure feelingsfear, anxiety, lack of self-confidence-do not spring from a heavenly oracle. They are not written in the stars. They are not holy gospel.
Nor are they intimations of a set and decided fate that means that failure is decreed and decided. They originate from your own mind. They are indicative only of attitudes of mind within you, not of external facts that are rigged against you. They mean only that you are underestimating your own abilities, overestimating and exaggerating the nature of the difficulty before you, and that you are reactivating memories of past failures rather than memories of past successes. That is all that they mean and all that they signify. They do not pertain to or represent the truth concerning future ‘events, but only your own mental attitude about the future event.Knowing this, you are free to accept or reject these negative failure feelings, to obey them and take counsel of them, or to ignore their advice and go ahead. Moreover, you are in a position to use them for , your own benefit.
Accept Negative Feelings as a Challenge
If we react to negative feelings aggressively and positively, they become challenges that automatically arouse more power and more ability within us. The ideas of difficulty, threat, and menace arouse additional strength within us if we react to them aggressively rather than passively. In the last chapter we saw that a certain amount of excitement, if interpreted correctly and employed ~orrectly, helps rather than hinders performance. It all depends on the individual and his or her attitudes, whether negative feelings are used as assets or liabilities.
React Aggressively to Your Own Negative Advice
Everyone has known individuals who can be discouraged and defeated by the advice from others that “yol;l can’t do it.” On the other hand, there are people , who rise to the occasion and become more determined than ever to succeed when given the same advice. An associate of industrialist Henry J. Kaiser’s said, “If you don’t want Henry to do a thing, you had better nOt make the mistake of telling him it can’t be done, or that he can’t do it-for he will then do it or bust.”
It is not only possible, but entirely practicable, to react in the same aggressive, positive manner to the “negative advice” of our own feelings as we can and should when the negative advice co)mes from others.
Overcome Evil with Good
Feelings cannot be directly controlled by willpower. They cannot be voluntarily made to order or turned on and off like a faucet. If they cannot be commanded, however, they can be wooed. If they cannot be controlled by a direct act of will, they can be controlled indirectly.
A bad feeling is not dispelled by conscious effort or willpower. It can be dispelled, however, by another feeling. If ~e cannot drive out a negative feeling by making a frontal assault on it, we can accomplish the same result by substituting a positive feeling. Remember that feeling follows imagery. Feeling coincides with, and is appropriate to, what our nervous system accepts as real or the truth about environment.
Whenever we find ourselves experiencing undesirable feelings, we should not concentrate on the undesirable feeling, even to the extent of driving it out. Instead, we should immediately concentrate on positive imagery, on filling the mind with wholesome, positive, desirable images, imaginations, and memories. If we do this, the negative feelings take care of themselves. They simply evaporate. We develop new feeling-tones appropriate to the new imagery.
If, on the other hand, we concentrate only on driving out or attacking worry thoughts, we necessarily must concentrate on negatives. And even if we are successful in driving out one worry thought, a new one, or even several new ones, are likely to rush in, since the general mental atmosphere is still negative. Jesus warned us about sweeping the mind clean of one demon, only to have seven new ones move in, if we left the house empty. He also advised us not to resist evil, but to overcome evil with good.
The Substitution Method of Curing Worry
Dr. Matthew Chappell, a modern psychologist, recommends exactly the same thing in his book How to Control Worry. We are worriers because we practice worrying until we become adept at it, says Dr. Chappell. We habitually indulge in negative imagery out of the past and in anticipating the future. This worry creates tension. The worrier then makes an effort to stop worrying and is caught in a vicious cycle.
Effort increases tension. Tension provides a worrying atmosphere. The only cure for worry, he says, is to make a habit out of immediately substituting pleasant, wholesome, mental images, for unpleasant worry images. Each time you find yourself worrying, use this as a signal to immediately fill the mind with pleasant mental pictures out of the past or in anticipating pleasant future experiences. In time worry will defeat itself because it becomes a stimulus for practicing antiworrying. The worrier’s job, says Dr. Chappell, is pot to overcome some particular source of worry, but to change mental habits. As long as the mind is set or geared in a passive, defeatist, “I hope nothing happens” sort of attitude, there will always be something to worry about.
When I was a medical student I remember being called on by the professor to orally answer questions on the subject of pathology.
Somehow, I was filled with fear and anxiety when I stood up to face the other students, and I couldn’t answer the questions properly. Yet, on other occasions, when I looked into the microscope at a slide and answered the typewritten questions before me, I was a different person.I was relaxed, confident, and sure of myself because I knew my subject. I had that winning feeling and did very well.
As the semester progressed I took stock of myself and when I stood up to answer questions I pretended I didn’t see an audience but was looking through a microscope. I was relaxed and substituted that winning feeling for the negative feeling when quizzed orally. At the end of the semester I did very well in both oral and written examinations.The negative feeling had finally become a sort of bell that created a conditioned reflex to. arouse that winning feeling.
Today, I lecture and speak with ease at any gathering in any part of the world, because I am relaxed and know what I am talking about when I do speak. More than that, I bring others into the conversation and make them feel relaxed too.
The Choice Is Up to You
Within you is a vast mental storehouse of past experiences and feelings, both failures and successes. Like inactive recordings on tape, these experiences and feelings are recorded on the neural engrams of your gray matter. There are recordings of stories with happy endings, and recordings of stories with unhappy endings. One is as true as the other. One is as real as the other. The choice is up to you as to which you select for playback.
Another interesting scientific finding about these engrams is that they can be changed or modified, somewhat as a tape recording may be changed by dubbing in .additional material, or by replacing an old recording with a new one.
These recordings in the human brain tend to change slightly each time they are played back. They take on some of th~ tone and temper of our pr.esent mood, thinking and attitudes toward them. 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 neither doomed nor damned by the past. Our present thinking, our present mental habits, our attitudes towards past experiences, and our attitudes toward the future-all have an influence on old recordings. The old can be changed, modified, replaced by our present thinking.
Old Recordings Can Be Changed
Another interesting finding is that the more a given recording or engram is activated or replayed, the more potent it becomes. The permanence of engrams ·is derived from synaptic efficacy (the efficiency and ease of connections between the individual neurons that make up the chain) and further that synaptic efficiency improves with use and diminishes with disuse. Here again, we have good scientific ground for forgetting and ignoring those unhappy experiences from the past and concentrating on the happy and pleasant. By so doing, we strengthen those engrams having to do with success and happiness and weaken those having to do with failure and unhappiness.
And with that, we will meet again next time with chapter 14,
How We Manufacture Feelings or “State”
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