I've been indirectly exposed to this book many times over the years since so many personal development books draw from it. As a recent example, the books I read and reviewed last year on sports psychology (see here, here and here) all borrow from Psycho-Cybernetics in one way or another.
Guess it was time to tackle the real thing.
This book's central idea is extremely useful: think of the human body as a servo-mechanism under your control, and then think of "you" (the combined entity of your mind/self plus your servo-mechanism) as an iterating, course-correcting "goal-seeking machine" designed for achievement, learning, growth and effort.
It's worth noting that the author is in no way saying we are robots. Robot don't have volition; we do. More importantly, our job as volitional, goal-seeking beings is to understand the ramifications of this volition: we have the ability to choose our goals, choose our targets--as well as choose how and to what extent we react or respond to adversity and other stimuli on the way to those goals. This is a paradigm from which we can draw enormous personal agency and power.
Unfortunately, once the book establishes this paradigm--as insightful and as powerful as it is--it then goes on to sound much like any other "success literature." As such, Psycho-Cybernetics is a useful but not great book, although still worth reading. And, at the very least you will get a good survey of all of the derivative personal development literature drawn from it!
[Affiliate link to the book here: https://amzn.to/3Aaim9h Note that you can support my work here by buying all your Amazon products via affiliate links from this site, or my sister site Casual Kitchen. THANK YOU!]
Pair with:
Nathaniel Brandon: The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
Eckhart Tolle: The Power of Now
Albert Ellis: Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy: It Works for Me-It Can Work for You
Notes/Thoughts:
Preface:
1) The author talks about both changes (and sometimes a striking lack of changes) in his patients' personalities after cosmetic surgery. He discovers that mere reconstruction of the physical image itself was not the real key to changes in personality, that there was something else: "It was as if personality itself had a 'face.' This non-physical 'face of personality' seem to be the real key to personality change." This led to his understanding of the internal self-image: "the individual's mental and spiritual concept or 'picture' of himself."
2) On teleology (we are explained by our purposes and our goals), on volition and will; drawing from robotics/cybernetics.
3) On synthesizing experience in our minds using visualization (this is a huge component of much of sports psychology literature).
4) "This book has been designed not merely to be read but to be experienced. You can acquire information from reading a book. But to experience you must creatively respond to information. Acquiring information itself is passive. Experiencing is active."
5) The author asks readers to jot down your own important points from each chapter (rather than passively giving the reader prepared bullet point summaries), the book also gives you certain exercises to perform frequently, likewise the book also asks you to reserve judgment for 21 days. And he offers an interesting gem of a thought on belief, learning and genuine change: "Therefore you will drive more benefit from this book if you will secure your own consent to reserve critical judgment for at least three weeks. During this time do not be continually looking over your shoulder, so to speak, or trying to measure your progress. During these 21 days do not argue intellectually with the ideas presented, do not debate with yourself as to whether they will work or not. Perform the exercises, even if they seem impractical to you. Persist in playing your new role, and thinking of yourself in new terms, even if you seem to yourself to be somewhat hypocritical in doing so, and even if the new self-image feels a little uncomfortable or 'unnatural.' You can neither prove nor disprove with intellectual argument the ideas and concepts described in this book, or simply by talking about them. You can prove them to yourself by doing them and judging results for yourself."
Ch 1: The Self-Image: Your Key to a Better Life
6) "Each of us carries about with us a mental blueprint or picture of ourselves." "The sort of person I am." "All your actions, feelings, behavior--even your abilities--are always consistent with the self-image."
7) "The self-image can be changed."
8) On changing the circumference of the self-image versus the self-image itself: "it is literally impossible to really think positively about a particular situation, as long as you hold a negative concept of self."
9) Prescott Lecky's idea of self-consistency in the personality, in which ideas that are inconsistent with the personality system are not believed and thus not acted upon.
10) How a scar can bring pride or shame, depending on the underlying beliefs of the person with it.
11) I guess in every era most people think themselves ugly, and while our media gives us the impression that this is something unique to today's era, we can see from the photo below (written in 1960) that there is nothing new under the sun.
13) Rather than having two minds, man has a consciousness which operates an automatic goal-striving machine.
14) The method [of this book] "consists in learning, practicing, and experiencing, new habits of thinking, imagining, remembering, and acting in order to one develop an adequate and realistic self-image, and to use your creative mechanism to bring success and happiness in achieving particular goals. ...The method to be used consists of creative mental picturing, creatively experiencing through your imagination, and the formation of new automatic reaction patterns by 'acting out' and acting 'as if.'"
Ch 2: Discovering the Success Mechanism Within You
15) Animals have certain instincts, so do humans, except humans can select their goals.
16) Looking at your physical brain and nervous system as a type of servo mechanism which you use as a mechanical goal-seeking device. It isn't that man is a machine, rather he has a machine which he uses as his goal-seeking device.
17) All machines, or computers or robots lack an intrinsic "operator," they cannot determine which goals are worthwhile and which are not; They don't have an 'I.'
18) Note also: ".. when we set out to find a new idea, or the answer to a problem, we must assume that the answer exists already-somewhere, and set out to find it." You adopt a belief set contingent on embarking on this pursuit.
19) "If you were engineered for success and happiness, then the old picture of yourself as unworthy of happiness, of a person who was 'meant' to fail, must be in error."
20) More on rhetorically helping the reader with buy-in/believing: "Read this chapter through at least three times per week for the first 21 days."
21) Chapter bullet points:
* your built-in success mechanism must have a goal or target
* the automatic mechanism is teleological, meaning it is oriented to end results or goals. The means may not be apparent, however! Think in terms of the end result and the means will take care of themselves
* do not be afraid of mistakes or temporary failures! Remember: servo mechanisms achieve goals by adjustments and correcting course
* if you make an error, remember the successful response and iterate; successful responses can be imitated and repeated
* you must learn to trust your creative mechanism and not jam it with concern, or worry, or too much force; you must let it work and trust it, rather than force it to work.
Ch 3: Imagination--The First Key to Your Success Mechanism
22) The 40-year-old man whose imagination told him that his nose and ears were so oversized that everyone laughed at him and considered him odd: his imaginings about this made it literally real.
23) "Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a 'real' experience." [This is a hugely important jumping off point for most sports psychology especially re: visualization practices]
24) "Human beings always act and feel and perform in
accordance with what they imagine to be true about
themselves and their environment."
25) The fact that so many of our beliefs (particularly our beliefs about ourselves) are self-fulfilling, why not imagine yourself successful? Why not adopt a belief set that is beneficial rather than a belief set that is detrimental?
26) On visualization, role-playing, mental pictures; different examples in sports. sales, music, business etc. On the natural, normal functioning of our minds/brains working its way to a target, using feedback and stored information, automatically correcting course when necessary, and you are the operator of this machine. It must have a target to shoot at, and if you see the thing clearly in your mind, you enable this system.
27) Likewise in personality transformation, one must see oneself in a new role. See also therapeutic situations: even disturbed psych patients were able to change their circumstances just by imagining they were behaving and acting like a well-adjusted person.
28) See also the (quite logically and rhetorically compelling) religious argument that God created us to achieve our potential, not to be a bunch of self-doubting beings designed to fail.
29) "Set aside a period of 30 minutes each day where you can be alone and undisturbed. Relax and make yourself as comfortable as possible. Now close your eyes and exercise your imagination." Imagining with rich detail, lots of sights, sounds, objects, sensations, etc.
Ch 4: Dehypnotize Yourself From False Beliefs
30) Alfred Adler accepting that he wasn't any good in math based on the decree of a teacher, but then effectively replacing that negative belief with a positive belief after a classroom experience of solving a problem. See also the businessman who replaced a negative belief about public speaking with a positive belief, simply because he felt it necessary and important to convey a vital message about a difficult field. Both of these people were self-hypnotized with a false belief, but then replaced that belief.
31) Further, it doesn't matter how you got the idea or the negative self-image: what matters is that you have accepted it and you are convinced that it is true.
32) [Related: see also the (much more recent) idea of "mass formation" from Matias Desmet, how it ties into the idea that anyone can hypnotized with certain false beliefs.]
33) On some level we have hypnotized ourselfs into beliefs about self-limitations we have. Why would we believe these beliefs?
34) On feelings of inferiority, inferiority complex: "Feelings of inferiority originate not so much from 'facts' or experiences, but from our conclusions regarding facts, and our evaluation of experiences... 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."
35) We judge ourselves against some other individual's norm, not our own, and then think, believe and assume that we should match this extrinsic norm, then feel miserable and conclude there's something wrong with us. [Maybe one could think of this like extrinsic validation: we'd generally rather avoid this form of validation to focus on intrinsic validation instead. The balance here comes from making sure you have accurate, fact-based information about where you literally are, what your level or capability literally is in a domain, and use that accurate information to make progress, rather than simply being delusional about how awesome you are and ignoring objective standards.]
36) How to use relaxation to dehypnotize yourself; note also that using "force" or "extra effort" doesn't work; see also Coué and his autosuggestion; also see Coué's law of reversed effort: "when the will and the imagination are in conflict, the imagination invariably wins the day." The idea here is if you want to change a habit or iterate yourself, it has to be done through relaxed effort, not forced effort; it has to be easy rather than willed. Counterintuitive!
37) Using mental pictures to relax, four exercises:
* "arms and legs made of concrete and very heavy"
* your body as a big marionette doll loosely held by strings and limp
* your body as a series of inflated rubber balloons, then the air escapes from your body and your whole body collapses against the bed
* imagining some relaxing and pleasant scene from your past, imagining small details, incidental things, etc.
Ch 5: How to Utilize the Power of Rational Thinking
38) On leaving the past alone and controlling your present thinking, on avoiding digging up your past. Note that all skill learning is accomplished by trial and error and then iteration, thus what's critical is that the error that has been recognized as such--once the correction has been made--this error must be forgotten and moved beyond. The successful iterated attempt is the one that must be remembered and dwelt upon, not the error.
39) "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 upon 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' which is consciously held in imagination and memory."
40) "Constantly criticizing yourself for past mistakes and errors does not help matters, but on the other hand tends to perpetuate the very behavior you would change."
41) [It's an interesting idea here the idea of ignoring past failures and forge ahead, it's a paradox: you have to both ignore and not ignore (or forget yet not forget) past failures, you have to somehow incorporate the iterative aspect of the mistake in the past, lose the emotional charge attached to it, and recognize that mistakes are part of the domain X (tennis, investing, whatever domain).]
42) The author discusses different authors' discoveries of this idea of "moving on": see Bertrand Russell's book The Conquest of Happiness as an example of a book probably worth reading.
43) Two levers, two standard (and highly logical) convictions that are strongly held by nearly everyone who is capable of changing their beliefs and inner concepts: 1) the feeling or belief that one is capable of doing one's share, holding up his end of the log, and 2) that there is something inside you which should not be allowed to suffer indignities. Thus a salesman shouldn't mentally cringe before meeting with an important prospect; we should not be begging for approval or acceptance from others, etc.
44) Likewise one should ask:
* Are there rational reasons for XYZ belief?
* Are you possibly mistaken about a belief, and thus why would you continue to believe in this belief if there's no good reason to believe it?
Again this gets to choosing belief sets that are useful rather than counterproductive.
45) On using indignation and anger as a liberator from false ideas: see Clarence Darrow's trying to get a mortgage and responding to someone saying "he'll never make enough money to pay it back" with indignation that drove his later success. His response to this drove the emergence of a new self.
46) Interesting idea of channeling emotions of both anger and indignation--as well as channeling logic--in order to adopt beneficial belief sets about your present self. This is the central idea of this chapter and it really flips reality on its head, you deliberately make reality much more subjective, choosing your belief sets on the fitness of those belief sets.
47) Reframing worries into possibilities (another example of being subjective about your beliefs and inverting them into something useful and productive).
48) "It is the job of the conscious, rational mind to form logical and correct conclusions. 'I failed once in the past, so I will probably fail in the future,' is neither logical or rational. To conclude 'I can't' in advance, without trying, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, 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?' 'I have never tried.'"
Ch 6: Relax and Let the Success Mechanism Work For You
49) The forebrain as the "you" who operates the mind/body servo-mechanism: note that technically speaking, the forebrain cannot do the job, its job is to pose problems and solutions and then use the servo mechanism to then carry out actions.
50) "Yet that is precisely what modern man tries to do--solve all his problems by conscious thought." The brain can't "do" anything, it requires a body to carry out the doing. Of course this doesn't stop us from living in our heads and confusing what we think up in our brains with actual real world experiences and real world feedback.
51) See William James's essay "The Gospel of Relaxation": that modern man is too concerned for results, too anxious, written way back in 1899 (!), on freeing ourselves from an egoistic preoccupation about results, on letting go of our attachment to outcome; see also the conceptual framework of "surrender."
52) You can't solve your problems by conscious thought, but by relaxation and letting go of your hold.
53) The idea of experiencing inspiration when you're not thinking about a problem at all: a solution just comes to you; see also how fretting and worrying about a problem don't help but rather hinders you reaching a solution; it jams your creative machinery.
54) Five rules for freeing your creative machinery:
* Let go of the result once you make a decision and decide to proceed ("do your worrying before you place your bet, not after the wheel starts turning")
* Respond continuously to the present moment (daytight compartments/"I will not drink today" from AA)
* Do only one thing at a time (see Dr. James Gordon Gilkey's 1944 sermon "Gaining Emotional Poise" on visualizing an hourglass with one grain of sand at a time passing through at a time as a metaphor for accomplishing things in single file)
* Sleep on it (Sir Walter Scott, when his ideas would not gel: "Never mind, I shall have it at seven o'clock tomorrow morning.")
* Carve out time to relax while working, using the mental relaxation exercises in Chapter 4 (the cement blocks, the limp marionette, the deflated balloons, etc.)
55) [Ironically I noticed while reading the section about living in the present, I was literally not in the present! I was thinking about the lift I was going to do half an hour from now, and then the grocery store I was going to go to afterwards, and then thinking about how the morning is slipping away from me a little bit and then I need to speed up my reading so that I can get going on the other things I want to do today... Freaking rich ironies; I wasn't reading at all, I was thinking about something else and (at least temporarily, until I recovered myself) totally missing the insights from this book.]
Ch 7: You Can Acquire the Habit of Happiness
56) One intriguing definition of happiness: "A state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant a good share of the time"
57) Physiologically and sensorily we function better when happy, see also the word "disease" which is a compound word of dis- and -ease, interesting!
58) It is not selfish to seek happiness.
59) Avoiding the idea of being happy "because of" something (...when I'm rich, when I'm thin, when I'm married, etc.), this is extrinsic.
60) Happiness is a mental habit which can be cultivated and developed. [Note that this is a belief set that can be "believed" or not; likewise one could reframe it slightly to add even more agency: "Happiness is a mental habit that I cultivate and develop"]
61) On not being a slave or a sheep to external events: don't let extrinsic factors dictate to you how you feel and react; the author uses a rhetorically powerful image of living like an obedient slave to an emcee on a TV show, telling you when to laugh, when to clap, etc. Instead, you become a master of your emotional state rather than a slave to external events. Epictetus: "Men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen."
62) Happiness requires problems; on our mental attitude towards setbacks and distress; on responding with solutions; see Thomas Edison after losing his lab to a fire: "We start rebuilding tomorrow morning."
63) On practicing the habit of reacting positively (aggressively so) toward threats and problems.
64) On being aggressive, systematic, and even cold-blooded on keeping one's thoughts pleasant and being happy, rather than passively waiting for happiness to "just happen to you" or be brought to you by someone else. "No one can decide what your thoughts shall be but yourself."
65) Performing surgery on your thinking rather than on your nose; cutting out negative thoughts.
66) "Our habits are literally garments worn by our personalities." Note the etymology of the word habit: it originally meant a garment; these habits fit us, but they can be changed, they are merely reactions and responses that we've learned automatically without having to think or decide; these responses can be changed, altered, eliminated, and new ones can be added, etc.; likewise our beliefs and psychological states are equally habitual: these are mental habits and responses to the external world and they can also be modified and replaced by the practice of other responses.
67) See also the practice exercise here of "tying your other shoe first" as a metaphor for trying on a different habit and as a reminder to change habitual ways of thinking, acting and feeling throughout the day.
68) Practice for 21 days:
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 upon their actions.
4. Insofar as possible, I am going to act as if success were 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' which I can do nothing to change.
Ch 8: ingredients of the "Success-Type" Personality and How to Acquire Them
69) It helps people to have a graphic picture of what a successful personality looks like, something to aim for and guide themselves towards.
70) The success type personality is composed of:
* Sense of direction: a goal to work for
* Understanding: of reality, of truth
* Courage: to act, to take risks, to make mistakes
* Charity: towards your fellow man
* Esteem: do not doubt yourself
* Self-confidence: dwelling on successes, using errors as a way to learn
* Self-acceptance: respecting yourself in the context of your imperfections and your potentiality
71) Other ideas:
* Develop "nostalgia for the future," the impetus to look forward
* Practice your courage on little things: don't wait to be a big hero in some dire crisis
* Remember that people are to be appreciated, they are children of God, treat them accordingly (see related: using the I-Thou relationship, rather than treating others as "equipment")
* Holding a low opinion of ourselves is a vice, not a virtue
* "It is necessary to intellectually recognize our shortcomings, but disastrous to hate ourselves because of them."
72) [This chapter is very rah rah, very stereotypical success literature. This can still be useful in its own way of course!]
Ch 9: The Failure Mechanism: How to Make it Work For You Instead of Against You
73) We need to be aware of the symptoms of a failure-type personality so that we can do something about them--and course correct:
Frustration (along with hopelessness and futility)
Aggressiveness (misdirected)
Insecurity
Loneliness
Uncertainty
Resentment
Emptiness
74) On frustration in the context of perfectionist goals as opposed to practical goals.
75) Misdirected aggression is blocked or frustrated emotional steam that finds an outlet in an unexpected or inappropriate way. One wants to be careful to direct one's aggressiveness toward the accomplishment of a worthwhile goal. It's critical to understand the frustration-aggression cycle and be mindful when your response is inappropriate; it is at these moments that you want to ask what it is that's frustrating you.
76) On "should-ing" yourself, which brings about insecurity.
77) On loneliness: loneliness is normal from time to time, but feelings of alienation are a different thing; also insecurity can lead to sham interpersonal relations or acting with pretense with other people, rather than unthawing and becoming more natural with our friends.
78) Uncertainty: avoiding decisions, "escaping" risk, being afraid of making a mistake, etc.
79) Resentment: of others' success, an attempt to make one's own failure palatable.
80) Emptiness: finding the outward symbols of success but finding the experience somehow empty, the person has lost the capacity to enjoy. Ironically, a person with the capacity to enjoy can find enjoyment in many ordinary things. "Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively."
81) The metaphor of a car dashboard: you pay attention to any dashboard lights that come on, but you don't stare at them or dwell on them, you only glance occasionally down. Most of your gaze is focused through the windshield, looking forward to where you want to go, and if a negative indicator goes off you take care of the problem, but then get back on your journey. [Pretty interesting metaphor here.]
Ch 10: How to Remove Emotional Scars or How to Give Yourself an Emotional Facelift
82) Emotional scars cause a self-image of being unwanted/unliked, you lose your trust in others; while it may originate as a protection mechanism (from someone who may have hurt you in the past), it causes you to be reactive to anyone ("this person might hurt me") and increases your hostility towards the world.
83) On having a thicker skin where necessary; having a healthy, strong ego, on not "bruising easily."
84) On how the person with the hard exterior or a juvenile delinquent with a hard shell typically is extremely vulnerable inside. If you are self-reliant and have proper "skin thickness" so to speak, you will not be vulnerable in this way.
85) Cutting out old emotional scars by sincere forgiveness; forgiveness is not a weapon, there are many kinds of false forgiveness; using it as a weapon ("forgiving but not forgetting"), using it to get ahead morally or ethically against the person who harmed you, getting a morbid pleasure out of nursing our wounds, etc.
86) See also forgiving ourselves, losing self-condemnation, remorse, regret, guilt, etc., these feelings are attempts to make things right in the past, it's appropriate to use them to help us respond, adjust and react appropriately in the present but we cannot live in the past.
87) Mistakes as things we "do" not as things that we "are"; failing versus being a failure; the mistake did not do this to you.
88) On the metaphor of an emotional facelift: by removing old emotional scars, eliminating grudges, casting off weight from old animosities we can literally takes weight off our shoulders and give ourselves a more youthful spirit.
89) [These middle few chapters are weaker than the rest of the book.]
Ch 11: How to Unlock Your Real Personality
90) Babies as guileless, not phony, uninhibited, everyone likes them.
91) A good personality or an uninhibited personality versus a poor personality or inhibited personality; one expresses itself the other restrains and locks it up.
92) Symptoms of inhibition: shyness, timidity, self-consciousness, hostility, nervousness, irritability etc, all due to excessive negative feedback: "excessive negative feedback equals inhibition."
93) Either there's too much negative feedback or we are too sensitive to negative feedback; either way, the response is inhibition.
94) Stuttering as example of excessive self-motoring: stuttering actually gives us useful clues on how we may disinhibit or release a locked-up personality in other areas (e.g. inhibited personality traits like excessive carefulness, purpose tremors, being too careful or trying too hard to do something, caring too much what others think. The solution comes when you ignore excessive negative feedback and instead adopt an "I've been through this a thousand times" mindset.
95) It is our duty to use the talents our Creator gave us. Thus our self-expression is appropriate, inhibition is not appropriate.
96) On practicing "disinhibition": iterating between more inhibition or less inhibition as our servo-mechanism iterates toward our goals, whatever they might be: "Here, the principle of cybernetics enters into the
picture again. Our goal is an adequate, self-fulfilling, creative personality. The path to the goal is a course between too much inhibition and
too little. When there is too much, we correct course by ignoring inhibition and practicing more disinhibition."
97) Excessive self-criticism versus simply factually asking, "I wonder if I should have done that?"
98) Practicing disinhibition by expressing good feelings, letting people know when you like them, expressing friendship, "compliment at least three people every day."
Ch 12: Do-It-Yourself Tranquilizers Which Bring Peace of Mind
99) Tranquilizers reduce or eliminate our own response to disturbing outside stimuli, they do not change the outside environment. Over-response is a bad habit which can be cured: you can refuse to respond to external signals. Metaphorically, for example, we can consider a ringing telephone: it has no power over you, thus you can condition yourself for equanimity (and extinguish conditioned responses) by starting with delaying your response, relaxing instead of responding, physical relaxation as a disinhibitor; a lack of response.
100) See also the idea of "clearing your mechanism" (or as we might say today "clearing your cache" or "clearing your browser") when going from thing to thing, from activity to activity; returning from work to home for example; the idea of being present wherever you happen to be; where you are is where you are, rather than where you were back when you were at the office.
101) Note that insomnia and rudeness are emotional carryovers, but likewise calmness and relaxation can be carried over as well.
102) Behaving as an "actor" not a "reactor." Also maintaining an "inner stabilizer" of emotional stability.
103) On creating strawmen and unreal problems, when doing nothing is the proper response; cultivating the habit to be in the present moment.
Ch 13: How to Turn a Crisis Into a Creative Opportunity
104) Some people do better under pressure, some people do worse; the "money player" when the chips are down;
105) On learning to react well to crisis situations:
* practice without pressure
* react to a crisis aggressively rather than defensively, and keep the positive goal in mind
* learn to evaluate so-called crisis situations in their true perspective
106) No-pressure practice: On shadow boxing, or practicing with the bat on your shoulder: just watching the ball for multiple reps, think of this in different domains as metaphor for practicing for more pressure situations.
107) You will go through the crisis experience to achieve your goal; while doing so, keep the goal in mind; this is a a type of aggressive agency toward the goal rather than a passive reaction to the crisis between you and the goal; choosing which behavior set receives emotional reinforcement, either our reaction to the crisis or our desire to achieve the goal. Thus we can make the most of the crisis situation.
108) Finally, on keeping things in proper context: many crises are not actually crises, they're just important situations that we shouldn't overestimate. Asking "what's the worst that could possibly happen?" as meta-question to help put things in proper context. "The greatest cause of ulcers is mountain-climbing over mole-hills!" This is the one of the reasons we view failure as synonymous with death. Sometimes a tremendous flop can be liberating: see the actor Walter Pidgeon, who felt he had nothing to lose after his first performance was a complete flop [heh also I had a similar experience singing karaoke for the first time in a bar in Santiago de Chile, it was so bad that it liberated me and murdered my fear of it forever.]
Ch 14: How to Get "That Winning Feeling"
109) On calling up mental states and visualizing circumstances as a present possibility.
110) More standard success literature anecdotes here J.C. Penney, Don Larson, etc.
111) Practice with a feeling of ease, constant straining and excess effort develops "feeling habits" of strain, difficulty, effort. This is a central idea to sports psychology, the idea to "try softer."
112) Mental pictures, visualization, what it would be like if I felt a given way, etc.
113) Positive mental imagery to control worry, substituting pleasant, successful images; if the subject finds himself worrying, using "noting I'm worrying" as a stimulus for practicing anti-worrying imagery of these positive images.
Ch 15: More Years of Life and More Life in Your Years
114) On aging, on holding "over beliefs" concerning known facts which are not accurate; believing that you can't do something you haven't done before is technically not accurate; likewise we can apply agency and strategy to choosing the beliefs that are effective and useful.
115) Note the quotes of major ideas from Hans Selye here: on "adaptation energy" as a sort of "life force"; his GAS (General Adaptation Syndrome) from the body adapting against generalized stressors.
116) Speculative ideas here about anti-aging; like cellular therapy from the 40s, other therapies which to a modern reader are somewhat laughable because they didn't work out (like most theories and most novel therapies, almost none of them really ever justify the initial enthusiasm).
117) The secret of rapid healers: optimistic, cheerful positive thinkers who expected to get well in a hurry, had something to get well for; ironically this is the same mechanism we talked about throughout this book: you need a target for your servo-mechanism to aim for and iterate towards!
118) Exposing yourself to more life, to more situations that require adaptation as a means toward an end of having more life: "If life adapts itself in so many varied forms to act as a means toward an end, is it not reasonable to assume that if we place ourselves in the sort of goal-situation where more life is needed, that we will receive more life?" Thinking of man as a goal-striving being, you thus will want to establish good goals and thus serve this central purpose of existence.
119) On creativity as one of the key elements of life force: Actuary tables indicate that creative workers live longer--and remain productive longer. Again, bringing up the idea of developing a "nostalgia for the future" if you want to remain productive and vital.
To Read:
Maxwell Maltz: New Faces--New Futures
Prescott Lecky: Self Consistency: A Theory of Personality
John von Newmann: The Computer and the Brain
Leslie D. Weatherhead: Prescription for Anxiety
Knight Dunlap: Habits: Their Making and Unmaking
Matthew N. Chappelle: How to Control Worry
John A. Schindler: How to Live 365 Days a Year
***Dorothea Brande: Wake Up and Live
***F.W.H. Myers: Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
**Bertrand Russell: The Conquest of Happiness
**Daniel W. Josselyn: Why Be Tired?
Dr. Elwood Worcester: Body, Mind and Spirit
Edward W. Bok: The Americanization of Edward Bok
James Mangan: The Knack of Selling Yourself
**James A. Hadfield: The Psychology of Power