Chapter 1
- TThe Blank Slate
- You Are Born Unafraid
- Your Mental Hard Drive
- Your Mini-Self-Concepts
- Change Your Beliefs
- Three Parts Of Your Self-Concept
- Control Your Inner Dialogue
- Examine Your Basic Premises
- You Are An Excellent Person
- The Mental Software Store
- Action Exercises
There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking. (1)
The Blank Slate
The Scottish philosopher David Hume was the first to propose the idea of the tabula rasa or blank slate. This theory says that each person comes into the world with no thoughts or ideas at all, and everything that a person thinks and feels is learned from infancy onward. It is as though the child’s mind is a blank slate that everything passing person and experience leaves a mark on. The adult becomes the sum total of everything he or she learns, feels, and experiences growing up. What the adult does and becomes later is the result of this early conditioning. As Aristotle wrote, “Whatever is impressed is expressed.” (2)
Perhaps the greatest breakthrough in the field of human potential in the twentieth century was the discovery of the self-concept. This is the idea that each person develops a bundle of beliefs regarding oneself, starting at birth. Your self-concept then becomes the master program of your subconscious computer, determining everything you think, say, feel, and do. For this reason, all change in your outer life begins with a change in your self-concept, with a change in the way you think and feel about yourself and your world.
The child is born with no self-concept at all. Every idea, opinion, feeling, attitude or value you have as an adult you learned from childhood. Everything you are today is the result of an idea or impression you took in and accepted as true.
When you believe something to be true, it becomes true for you, whatever the fact may be. “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.”
You Are Born Unafraid
Thomas J. Watson, one of the giants of American business, replied with these profound words: “If you want to be successful faster, you must double your rate of failure. Success lies on the far side of failure.”
Your Mental Hard Drive
Everything you know about yourself, all your beliefs, are recorded on the hard drive of your personality, in your self-concept. Your self-concept precedes and predicts your levels of performance and effectiveness in everything you do. (6)
Because of the law of correspondence, you always behave on the outside in a manner consistent with your self-concept on the inside. All improvement in your life therefore begins with an improvement in your self-concept. (6)
Your Mini-Self-Concepts
For example, you have a self-concept for how healthy and fit you are, and how much you eat or exercise. You have a self-concept for how likable and popular you are with others, especially with members of the opposite sex. You have a self-concept for what kind of a spouse or parent you are, for how good a friend you are to your friends, how smart you are, and how well you learn. You have a self-concept for every sport you play, and for every activity you engage in, including how well you drive your car.
You have a self-concept for how well you do your work, and for how well you do each part of your work. You have a self-concept for how much money you make and how well you save and invest it. This is a critical area. (7)
The fact is that you can never earn much more or less than your self-concept level of income. If you want to make more money, you have to change your beliefs about yourself relative to income and money. This is an important part of this book. (7)
Change Your Beliefs
In every case, if you want to change your performance and your results in any area of your life, you have to change your self-concept – or your beliefs about yourself – for that area. Fortunately, your beliefs are largely subjective. They are not always based on fact. Instead, they are based largely on information you have taken in and accepted as true, sometimes with very little evidence or proof. (7)
The starting point of unlocking your potential, and accomplishing more than you ever have before, is for you to challenge your self-limiting beliefs.* You begin this process of freeing yourself from self-limiting beliefs by imaging that, whatever they are, they are completely untrue. Imagine for the moment that you have no limitations on your abilities at all. Imagine that you could be, do, or have anything you really wanted in life. Imagine that your potential is unlimited in any way. (7)
For example, imagine that you could be earning twice as much as you are earning today. Imagine that you could be living in a bigger house, driving a better car, and enjoying a more expensive lifestyle. (8)
Imagine that you have the ability to be one of the top people in your field. Imagine that you are one of the most popular, powerful, and persuasive in your social and business world. Imagine that you are calm, confident, and unafraid of anything. Imagine that you could set and achieve any goal you put your mind to. This is how you begin changing your thinking and changing your life. (8)
The starting point of eliminating your fears, and releasing your potential, is to reprogram your mental hard drive with new, positive, constructive, and courageous beliefs about yourself and your future.…
Three Parts Of Your Self-Concept
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The Way You See Yourself
By visualizing and imagining yourself performing at your best in an upcoming situation , you send a message to your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind accepts this message as a command, and then coordinates your thoughts, words, and actions so that they fit a pattern consistent with the picture you created. (9)
All improvement in your life begins with an improvement in your mental pictures. (9)
Control Your Inner Dialogue
Just as you become what you think about, you also become what you say to yourself. (11)
Examine Your Basic Premises
If you believe yourself to be an excellent person, loaded with talent and ability, friendly and popular, healthy and energetic, curious and creative, and destined to have a wonderful life, these basic premises will lead you to set goals, work hard, develop yourself, treat others well, bounce back from adversity, and ultimately succeed. Nothing will be able to stop you in the long run. (12)
It is not what happens to you in life that is important. It is only how you react to what happens. (12)
It doesn’t matter where you’re coming from, either. All that really matters is where you are going. And where you are going is limited only by your own imagination. And since your imagination is unlimited, your future is unlimited as well. These are the basic premises and beliefs you need to fulfil your potential.
You Are An Excellent Person
You are a thoroughly good person. You are honest, decent, truthful, and hardworking. You treat other people with courtesy, respect, and warmth. You are dedicated to your family, friends, and your company. You are strong, confident, and responsible. You are knowledgeable, intelligent, and experienced. You are important not only to the people closest to you, but also to your community. You were born for a special reason and you have a great destiny to fulfil. You are an excellent person in every way.
The Mental Software Store
If you absolutely believed that you were guaranteed to be happy and successful, and that every setback or obstacle was sent to you to teach you important lessons that you needed to know to achieve your goals, you would be completely unstoppable. (16)
Action Exercises
1. Define your ideals clearly. If you could be an excellent person in every way, what qualities would you have.? How would you behave?
2. You become what you think about most of the time. Identify one or more areas of your life where your thinking is having a major influence on your emotions, attitudes, or actions.
3. In what area of activity do you perform at your best? How do you visualize yourself in that area? How could you extend this act of visualization to other areas?
4. What kind of people do you most admire and respect? Why? How could you change your behaviour so that it is more consistent with that of the best people you know?
5. In what areas of your life do you like yourself the most? What sorts of activities give the highest levels of self-esteem and personal value? How could you do even more of these things?
6. You are a thoroughly good person. From this day forth, see yourself as the very best you can be, and refuse to accept any limitations on your possibilities.
7. Change your self-concept by continually thinking, talking, and acting as if you were already the person you would like to be, enjoying the life that you want and deserve.