You are embarking on the greatest adventure of your life – to improve your self-image, to create more meaning in your life and in the lives of others. This is your responsibility.
Experimental and clinical psychologists have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an “actual” experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail.
I have found that one of the commonest causes of unhappiness among my patients is that they are attempting to live their lives on the deferred payment plan. They do not live, or enjoy life now, but wait for some future event or occurrence. They will be happy when they get married, when they get a better job, when they get the house paid for, when they get the children through college, when they have completed some task or won some victory. Invariably, they are disappointed.
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 on 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” that is consciously held in imagination and memory.
Stop measuring yourself against “their” standards. You are not “them” and can never measure up. Neither can “they” measure up to yours – nor should they. Once you see this simple, rather self-evident truth, accept it, and believe it, your inferior feelings will vanish.
The lucky of successful person has learned a simple secret. Call up, capture, evoke the feeling of success. When you feel successful and confident, you will act successfully.
The individual who is actively engaged in a struggle, or in striving toward an important goal, does not come up with pessimistic philosophies concerning the meaninglessness or the futility of life.
Knowledge Gives You Power.
The self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment. It defines what you can and cannot do. Expand the self-image and you expand the “area of the possible.” The development of an adequate, realistic self-image will seem to imbue the individual with new capabilities, new talents, and literally turn failure into success.
In an interview in 1992, Leary stated, “It is a genetic imperative to explore the brain. Because it’s there. If you’re carrying around in your head 100 billion mainframe computers, you just have to get in there and learn how to operate them.
A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it is going forward towards something. You have a good bicycle. Your trouble is you are trying to maintain your balance sitting still, with no place to go.
You act, and feel, not according to what things are really like, but according to the image your mind holds of what they are like. You have certain mental images of yourself, your world, and the people around you, and you behave as though these images were the truth, the reality, rather than the things they represent.
No man is hurt but by himself,” said Diogenes.
No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes. – William E. Gladstone.
Ideas are changed, not by will, but by other ideas.
In expecting to grow “old” at a given age we may unconsciously set up a negative goal image for our Creative Mechanism to accomplish.
To the degree that we deny the gift of life, we embrace death.
2. The self-image can be changed. Numerous case histories have shown that one is never too young or too old to change his self-image and thereby start to live a new life. One of the reasons it has seemed so difficult for a person to change his habits, his personality, or his way of life has been that heretofore nearly all efforts at change have been directed to the circumference of the self, so to speak, rather than to the center.
The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere. – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Learning the happiness habit, you become a master instead of a slave, or as Robert Louis Stevenson said, “The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
You must have a clear mental picture of the correct thing before you can do it successfully.