Happiness is found in the present
tags:: #a/statement on/happiness
tags:: #source/book Psychology on/visualisation on/hypnosis on/happiness
author:: Maxwell Maltz
read:: true
Relax and let your Success Mechanism work for you
Our trouble is that we ignore the automatic Creative Mechanism and try to solve all our problems by conscious thought, or forebrain thinking.
If we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the inhibitive influence of reflection upon them.
Success comes when you give up the struggle consciously, and stop trying to solve your problems by conscious thought.
We are all creative workers.
Skill is not in painfully and consciously thinking out each action, but letting the job do itself through you.
Focus on the journey the majority of the time, and occasionally tune into the goal.
Five Rules for Freeing Your Creative Machinery
Do your worrying before you place your bet, not after the wheel starts turning
After we have set the wheels in motion, so to speak, we continually worry over how it would come out.
I have discovered that much nervousness and anxiety is caused by mentally trying to escape or run away from something that you have decided to go through with physically.
Form the habit of consciously responding to the present moment
By living today well you do the most within your power to make tomorrow better.
The Native Americans and the early pioneers had to be alert to the sights and sounds and feelings of their environment in order to survive. So does modern man, but for a different reason: not because of physical dangers, but because of the dangers of "nervous disorders" that come from confused thinking.
Try to do only one thing at a time
The jittery feelings are not caused by the work, but by our mental attitude which is "I ought to be able to do this all at once." We become nervous because we are trying to do the impossible.
Ingredients of the "Success-Type" Personality and How to Acquire Them
Courage
"The best defense is a strong offense is a military principle, but its application is wider than war. All problems, personal, national, or combat, become smaller if you don't dodge them but confront them. Touch a thistle timidly, and it pricks you; grasp it boldly and its spines crumble." – Admiral William F. Halsey on/courage
Any time you act can be wrong. Your automatic guidance system cannot guide you when you're stalled, standing still.
Maybe our urge to gamble comes form an urge to bet on ourselves and take risks.
"Most people don't know how brave they really are. In fact, many potential heroes, both men and women, live out their lives in self-doubt. If they only knew they had these deep resources, it would give them the self-reliance to meet most problems, even a big crisis."
Compassion
Our feelings about ourselves tend to correspond to our feelings about other people. When someone begins to feel more compassion about others, he invariably begins to feel more compassion toward himself.
If you don't feel important, stop judging others.
To stop feeling guilt, stop condemning other people in your own mind.
Another reason why compassion is symptomatic of the successful personality type is because it means they're dealing with reality: people are important.
Esteem
Self-distesteem, "It's no use, I can't do it," is the deadliest of all the traps and pitfalls in life.
Holding a low opinion of ourselves is not a virtue—it's a vice.
Practice appreciating your worth. Your esteem comes not from what you've done but from what you are.
Self-Confidence
We can just as easily delete negative thoughts from our minds as we can delete documents by dragging them into the trash on our computer screen.
Confidence is built on an experience of success. Our Success Mechanism is engaged when you repeat the commands that work and remember them. Forget the mistakes and errors.
You don't learn from failure—otherwise you would get worse the more you practice.
Self-Acceptance
Success comes from self-expression. It eludes people who strive and strain to be somebody—and often comes, almost of its own accord, when a person becomes willing to relax and be himself.
No one ever succeeds during a lifetime in fully expressing or bringing into actuality all the potentialities of the real self. In our actual, expressed self, we never exhaust all the possibilities and powers of the real self. We can always learn more, perform better, behave better. The actual self is necessarily imperfect. Throughout life it is always moving toward an ideal goal, but never arriving. The actual self is not a static but a dynamic thing. It is never completed and final, but always in a state of growth.
How to Unlock Your Real Personality
Your real self is already in you, to be released.
The real self is attractive, magnetic, and can powerfully influence other people.
This is why people love a baby or a cat.
The enemy is the inhibited personality, which thinks too much before expressing itself.
Characteristics of inhibited personality:
- Frustration
- Stuttering
- Seeing oneself as not enough
Source: excessive negative feedback. Normal negative feedback is good and taken as corrective action, not stopping the action.
Self-expression may become morally "wrong" as far as your conscience is concerned, if you were squelched, shut-up, shamed, humiliated, or perhaps punished as a child for speaking up, expressing your ideas, "showing off."
Purpose tremor: how we start trembling when precision in movement becomes very important and we overly focus on it.
Solutions:
- Relaxation
- Reducing attachment to outcome
- Imagine you're in a relaxing environment (positive memory)
- Practice being less careful
- Speak before you think
- Act without thinking
- Let people know when you like them
Yes, we need some amount of inhibition, but if you have too much you need to practice reducing it.
Example in teaching: prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall always be on tap; then in the classroom trust your spontaneity and fling away all further care.
Never "try" to make a good first impression.
You're not "self-conscious," you're too conscious of others.
The yardstick of emotions is not if they're good or bad, but if they're appropriate or inappropriate.
From the moment of birth you were immersed in action. You cannot think before you act, you can only go and course-correct.
Do-It-Yourself Tranquilizers That Bring Peace of Mind
Our feelings do not depend on externals, but on our own attitudes, reactions, and responses.
Over-Response
We often respond overly, like getting stressed once the phone rings, making us pick it up immediately.
Practice relaxation by not responding and relaxing in that. Visualize this practice: sit down, imagine the phone is ringing and not reacting to it. Visualize going calmly and effortlessly to the daily tasks.
If you cannot ignore the response, delay it.
Physical Relaxation
You cannot feel angry, fearful, anxious, insecure, unsafe as long as you muscles remain perfectly relaxed.
Build a Quiet Room
Create a clean, quiet room in your mind. Close your eyes and walk up to this room. Enter it, and see it with vivid detail. It should be simple.
I have a big wall of books and a fireplace. A chair in front of it. A big window overlooking a valley. Some birds in the background, the crackling of the fire, the smell of wood.
"I have a foxhole in my mind." – President Harry Truman
Visit this decompression chamber between activities.
"Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break, but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it." – Marcus Aurelius
Man is not primarily a "reactor" but an "actor"
Stabilize
In almost any goal-striving situation, our own inner stability is in itself an important goal to maintain.
How to Turn a Crisis into a Creative Opportunity
Some people react well in a crisis and rise up to the challenge, others fail when they're under pressure. How do you do the former?
Practice without Pressure
Under pressure we learn fast, but not well. What we learn gets stuck and it's harder to unlearn.
Cognitive Map: your mind, as it learns, builds a map of the concept. If it's over-motivated, the map becomes narrow instead of wide, and you learn to only follow the set plan that got you out of the crisis the first time.
Shadowboxing: practicing the moves before you're under pressure, builds myelin and makes you used to the action. Then, when faced with a stressful situation, you'll handle it well.
Slowly build up to avoid stress tremor. Practice the moves without any pressure to achieve first, then slowly add them in.
Baseball: let the bat come around and meet the ball.
Crisis Brings Power
React to moments of crisis aggressively.
Only if we fearlessly accept the challenge and confidently expand our strength, every danger or difficulty brings its own strength.
Prescott Lecky believed there was only one basic emotion, "excitement," and that it manifests itself as fear, anger, courage, etc., depending on our own inner goals at the time.
What Is the Worst That Can Possibly Happen?
To calm yourself down, do Fear-setting.
Mountain climbing over molehills.
How to Get That Winning Feeling
Once you give your automatic Creative Mechanism a definite goal to achieve, you can depend on its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than you could ever could by conscious thought.
Think of the end result in terms of a present possibility.
If we dwell upon failure, and continually picture failure to ourselves in such vivid detail that it becomes real to our nervous system, we will experience the feelings that go with failure.
The winning feeling does not cause you to operate successfully, but is more in the nature of a sign or symptom that you are geared for success.
To me, happiness is not about positive thoughts. It's not about negative thoughts. It's about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things. The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving, because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be. If I latch onto a feeling, if I say "oh, I'm happy now" and I want to stay happy, then I'm going to drop out of that happiness. Now, suddenly, the mind is moving. It's trying to attach to something. It's trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation.