Maxwell Maltz

His plight is somewhat comparable to the young man who cannot secure a job because he has no experience, and cannot acquire experience because he cannot get a job.

“Nothing succeeds like success.” We learn to function successfully by experiencing success. Memories of past successes act as built-in “stored information,”

Understanding the psychology of the self can mean the difference between success and failure, love and hate, bitterness and happiness. The discovery of the real self can rescue a crumbling marriage, recreate a faltering career, and transform victims of “personality failure.”
On another plane, discovering your real self means the difference between freedom and the compulsions of conformity.

1. All your actions, feelings, behaviors—even your abilities—are always consistent with this self-image. In short, you will “act like” the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.

Theatre of the Mind. I’d close my eyes, then remember and relive my best moments—seeing them play out like a mental movie. My victories. My successes. My happiest times.

I told him first of all to practice a number of imaginary interviews—actually walking in, introducing himself to a prospect, making his sales pitch—then imagine every possible objection, no matter how screwballish, and answer it out loud. Next, he was to practice “with his bat on his shoulder” on an actual live client. He was to go in with an “empty gun” as far as intents and purposes were concerned. The purpose of the sales interview would not be to sell—he had to resign himself to being satisfied with no order. The purpose of the call would be strictly practice—bat-on-the-shoulder, empty-gun practice.

You intend to “go through” the crisis experience to achieve your goal.

Curiously enough, this is not because “self-image psychology” has not worked, but because it has worked so amazingly well. As one of my colleagues expressed it, “I am reluctant to publish my findings, especially for the lay public, because if I presented some of the case histories and described the rather amazing and spectacular improvements in personality, I would be accused of exaggerating, or trying to start a cult, or both.”

Insofar as function is concerned, the brain and nervous system constitute a marvelous and complex “goal-striving mechanism,” a sort of built-in automatic guidance system that works for you as a “success mechanism,” or against you as a “failure mechanism,” depending on how “YOU,” the operator, operate it and the goals you set for it.

This Creative Mechanism within you is impersonal. It will work automatically and impersonally to achieve goals of success and happiness, or unhappiness and failure, depending on the goals that you
yourself set for it. Present it with “success goals,” and it functions as a Success Mechanism. Present it with negative goals, and it operates just as impersonally, and just as faithfully, as a Failure Mechanism.