Psycho-Cybernetics

Maxwell Maltz

📚 GENRE: Personal Development

📃 PAGES: 336

✅ COMPLETED: April 14, 2018

🧐 RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

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Short Summary

Maxwell Maltz explains how the self-image has significant control over an individual’s ability to achieve, or fail to achieve, any goal. Maltz discusses some of the techniques he created to develop and manage self-image, including visualization, mental rehearsal, relaxation, and more. Maltz also reveals the right way to set goals and how to go about achieving them. 

Key Takeaways

1️⃣ Develop Your Self-Image — The self-image is powerful and everyone has one. An individual’s self-image — defined as the culmination of our own beliefs about ourselves — can play a huge role in success success or failure. Your behavior and performance will normally always follow your self-image and what you believe you are capable of. 

2️⃣ Set a Goal, See a Goal — One of the keys to achieving goals is to think about them often after you’ve set them. Picture yourself accomplishing the goal. See it. When you constantly think about your goals and believe in them, the mind will act like a tracking system and naturally take you to the people, places, and opportunities you need to reach the goal.

3️⃣ Visualize — The nervous system can’t differentiate between a real experience and an imagined one. Visualization is a powerful mental tool and is used by high performing athletes and business executives. Visualization gives the mind a picture to pursue. You have to see it in your mind before it can happen. 

Favorite Quote

"Men are not disturbed by the things that happened to them but by their opinion of the things that happened."

Book Notes 📑

Preface

  • Author Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon, who noticed changes in personality after fixing people’s faces. 
    • This observation is partly what led him to study and write this book.
    • Maltz later concluded that a person’s self-image was the real key to personality and behavior.
  • Self-Image Principles:
    1. Self-image is the key to personality and behavior. Change the self-image, change the personality and behavior of a person.
    2. Self-image sets boundaries for individual accomplishment. It defines what you can or cannot do. Expand the self-image, expand what’s possible. 
  • The brain and nervous system work in harmony with self-image to accomplish goals.
    • Your experiences are ultimately a huge factor in shaping your self-image. 
      • When you start to stack good experiences together, your self-image changes. 
  • It’s not what you learn, but what you experience.
    • We learn to function successfully by experiencing success.
    • We can CREATE experience in our minds through visualization.
    • Research has proven that the nervous system and mind cannot differentiate between an actual experience and an experience imagined in great detail through visualization.
  • Humans were built to strive for goals. Happiness and goal achievement are linked.

Chapter 1

  • Each of us has a self-image. 
    • This self-image is a culmination of our own beliefs about ourselves. 
    • The self-image is built on beliefs derived from our experiences.
      • Ex. If you constantly win and get the job done in all areas of your life, you come to see yourself as a winner. 
  • Self-image is the golden key to a successful life because:
      1. All actions, feelings, behaviors, and abilities will be consistent with your self-image. 
        • You will act like the person you see yourself as. You can’t act otherwise. 
        • You can’t underperform or outperform your self-image. 
      1. The self-image can be changed.
        • It can be changed by accumulating experiences that align with the self-image you want to create. 
  • When your self-image is strong, you are self-confident.
  • Just as a man can picture an idea or invention in the mind and then make it happen, a man can create a different self-image picture for himself and become that image.
  • We all have goals, whether we think of them consciously or not.
    • The goals that our mind seeks to achieve are mental images, which we create with our own imagination.
  • If our mind is constantly fed with negative thoughts and attitudes then we will act on those beliefs.
  • The key to living a great life is to learn about the mind and how to use it to your benefit. You do this by learning, experiencing, imagining, acting, and practicing in order to:
    1. Develop a good and productive self-image
    2. Use your mind to bring success and achieve your goals
  • Visualization — Creating mental pictures. 
    • It is no more difficult than remembering a scene from the past or worrying about the future.
  • Acting out new patterns is no more difficult than deciding to change and then following through.
    • Ex. Tying your shoe. If you want to change the way you tie your shoe, decide on a new way to tie them and then practice that new way over and over. 
      • You can do this with any area of your life. It starts with a desire to change. After that, it’s about repeating the behavioral patterns. 

Chapter 2

  • Everybody has a built-in guidance system and goal-striving mechanism. 
    • You can direct your success mechanism using imagination. 
    • Quote: “You can imagine your future.”
  • We all have a goal-tracking guidance system within us that takes into account a lot of things, like past experience, to accomplish the goal. 
    • Ex. A center fielder tracking a fly ball. The player’s mind is recalling past experiences to take the most efficient route to the ball. 
  • Tips to Achieve Goals:
    • Your mind MUST have an end goal or target to shoot for. Your mind then steers you to the goal.
      • All decisions and behaviors along the way will be designed to get you to that end goal. 
    • Your mind will find a way to the goal. You just need to keep thinking of the end goal repeatedly and picture it clearly. Visualize it. You don’t necessarily need to worry about the how. 
    • Do not worry about failing. Your mind uses failure to correct its course on the way to the goal.
      • Every time you fail, you get closer to the goal. You learn a ton with each failure. 
    • Skill learning of any kind happens by trial and error.
      • The more you perform the skill, the better you get at it. 
    • You have to trust the mind and not force things. 
      • Act like the goal is going to happen and trust the process. Believe. 
  • Think of the mind as a Google search bar. When you put something into Google, it finds the answer. 
    • Similarly, if your self-image is positive and upbeat, the subconscious mind will begin to naturally put out results, thoughts, and behaviors that align with that self-image. 
    • Give the mind an end goal to strive for and it will take care of the rest. It will take you where you need to go to get to that goal. 

Chapter 3

  • Imagination and visualization are two huge factors in forming your self-image.
    • Ex. One of Maltz’s patients imagined he was being made fun of for a large nose and ears. This created a negative self-image.
  • Quote: “A man acts, feels, and performs in accordance to what he believes to be true about himself.”
    • Again, your mind and nervous system can’t tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real one.
    • Focus on seeing yourself in a positive and successful way.
      • Visualize and use mental pictures. 
      • Legendary golfer Ben Hogan used to visualize constantly.
  • Cybernetics — Views the brain, muscle function, and nervous system as a complex mechanism — an automatic goal-seeking machine that steers itself to the target using feedback and stored information, and corrects course when needed.
    • This field views the mind and body as a machine that you pilot.
    • This mechanism only operates with a goal and target to shoot at. You provide this by visualizing and picturing your goals.
    • By picturing an end goal repeatedly, you will do what’s required to accomplish the goal.
  • Before somebody can change, they have to see themselves differently in their mind.
    • Focus on forming a mental picture of yourself in your imagination and SEE yourself in the role.
      • This is taught to alcoholics as they recover. 
  • Quote: “Hold a picture of yourself in your mind long and steady and you will be drawn towards it… Picture yourself as defeated and victory is impossible.”
    • Everything starts with picturing what you want to do and be in your mind.
    • Visualize success. Visualize yourself doing great things in all areas of your life. 
      • You have to see it in your mind first before it can happen. This is the purpose of visualization. 
  • Your current self-image was built with your imagination and mental pictures, which developed out of the valuations you placed on your experiences.
    • Again, your past experiences — and the judgments you placed on yourself from those experiences — are what have shaped your current self-image.
      • You can use the same method to build a different self-image.
      • Set aside 30 minutes per day to close your eyes and visualize. 
        • Make mental pictures as vivid and detailed as possible.

Chapter 4

  • Dr. Joseph Adler had an experience that shows how critical self-belief is for behavior and ability.
    • Adler was off to a bad start in math when he was a kid and was told by his teacher that he was not smart.
      • He believed this valuation for years and the results showed.
    • One day, he had a revelation. He knew how to work a math problem in school that none of his peers could. In front of the whole class, he solved the problem on the board. 
      • That single experience made him believe he was good at math, and he went on to be a great math student.
  • You should NEVER allow the opinions other people have about you to dictate your own beliefs about yourself. 
    • Doing this can be really destructive to your self-image and confidence. 
    • Ex. Some school kids get told by people around them that they aren’t smart. They automatically believe this and see themselves in this way. Bad grades follow.
  • You can’t compare yourself to others. The only person you should ever compare yourself to is the previous version of yourself. 
    • You are not inferior or superior to anyone else. You are you, and there is nothing wrong with how you are. 
      • The problem comes when you start to think there’s a problem with being different than other people. 
      • Everybody is unique and different in their own way, and there is never a problem with that. 

Chapter 5

  • Conscious thinking is the control knob for your mind.
    • Conscious thinking and visualization are how you begin to change your self-image.
  • Past experiences are irrelevant now. Memories of past failures do not matter.
    • Move forward. 
  • Failure is necessary to accomplishing goals. Don’t avoid it.
    • When you fail, it gives you feedback that can be used to make adjustments and get closer to your goals. 
    • Failures and mistakes are a means to an end, not the end itself. You can’t dwell on mistakes or you’ll just continue to fail in a similar manner.
  • Learn to question negative thoughts and beliefs about yourself.
  • Use mental pictures and visualization to your benefit. 
    • When you worry, you have a negative picture in your mind. You dwell on that picture and you think about it constantly. 
      • Emotions (like fear) then kick in. 
    • You can instead choose to visualize a positive end result and dwell on that picture.
  • Your mind can work in your favor or to your detriment. It all depends on what you feed it through thought, mental pictures, visualization, and goals.
    • A lot of people are unknowingly feeding bad information to the mind because they don’t understand that they have a choice. 

Chapter 6

  • Rather than fight fear and stress, surrender to it.
    • Let go and stop trying so hard.
    • Don’t take yourself too seriously.

Chapter 7

  • Happiness — Thinking pleasant thoughts most of the time.
    • Everything is better when you focus on pleasant thoughts and visualizations.
    • Happiness is a state of mind. It’s not something that can be achieved by ‘getting things.’
    • Happiness is found in the present moment, not the future or the past.
  • Focus on being grateful and placing your attention on the things that you already have.
    • Keep your focus on what you have! Stop dwelling on what you don’t have.
  • Unhappiness occurs when you let outside things that are out of your control affect your thinking and your self-esteem.
    • When you believe the negative opinions other people might have of you, it leads to chaos. 
  • Quote: “Men are not disturbed by the things that happened to them but by their opinion of the things that happened.”
    • It’s not what happens to you, but how you respond and interpret what just happened.
      • If you love yourself completely and don’t allow things to get to you, you have it made. 
    • Form the habit of reacting aggressively and positively towards problems.
  • Self-image and habits go hand-in-hand.

Chapter 8

  • The success type personality is composed of:
    • S — Sense of Direction 
    • U — Understanding
    • C — Courage
    • C — Compassion 
    • E — Esteem
    • S — Self-Confidence
    • S — Self-Acceptance 
  • Make sure you always have goals you’re striving for. Look forward.
  • You have to have the courage to take risks to achieve your goals.

Chapter 9

  • Never complain and feel sorry for yourself. 
    • Dwelling on things never helps at all.
      • Instead focus on a solution. Focus on getting better.
  • Constant exposure to fear reduces the fear gradually.
    • The more you attack a fear, the more it loses its power over you.
  • We learn more through our failures than our successes.
    • Failure is ultimately a good thing. Run towards it.

Chapter 10

  • Qualities of self-fulfilled people:
    1. They see themselves as liked, wanted, acceptable, and able.
    2. They completely accept themselves as they are.
    3. They have a feeling of “oneness” with other people. They feel connected, not isolated. 
    4. They have a rich store of information and knowledge.
  • Give love and acceptance to others and you will receive the same in return.
  • Mistakes don’t make you a failure. Forgive yourself and forgive others.

Chapter 11

  • Everybody has personality. Some people keep it inhibited.
    • Some people lock up their personality around others.
      • Signs: Shyness, self-consciousness, nervousness.
  • A shy or inhibited personality is usually a result of excessive internal negative feedback.
    • Ex. Stuttering — One study had 25 severe stutterers wear headphones and read prepared passages. The subjects had their stuttering improve significantly when they could not hear themselves speaking and become self-critical of their own voice.
  • Trying too hard not to make a mistake leads to mistakes. It is a form of excessive negative feedback. The result is poor performance.
    • STOP TRYING SO HARD. 
      • Relax, loosen up, stop caring so much. 
      • Stop taking things so serious. 
      • Joke around, have fun.
    • It’s counterintuitive — the harder your try, the more pressure you feel, and the worse you do. 
  • Quote: “I don’t like these cold, precise people who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all. And in order not to do wrong, don’t do anything.”
    • Again, stop caring so much. Relax and be yourself. Don’t worry about saying something dumb or making a fool of yourself. 
      • You have the power to do this when you love yourself completely and don’t allow the opinions of other people to affect you. 
  • Self-Consciousness = Others Consciousness 
    • When you are self-conscious, it’s usually because you care too much about what others are thinking.
    • When you become too consciously aware of what others think, when you try to please other people constantly, when you become too sensitive to real or perceived disapproval of others, you have too much negative feedback going on.
      • You gotta stop caring so much about what others may or may not think of you. 
  • When you try to monitor and control every word, mannerism, and act, you are too inhibited and self-conscious.
    • Instead, let go and let it rip. Stop trying to careful measure every word and behavior. 
  • To become less inhibited in personality, you must practice letting go: Be less careful, less concerned, less conscious. 
    • Ex. Try to speak before you think.
      • Don’t think of what you want to say, just say it. 
      • Stop criticizing yourself. 
      • Speak louder than usual.

Chapter 12

  • Build a visual that you can go to whenever you need to relax.
    • Ex. The Marriott resort in Kauai.

Chapter 13

  • Try to be aggressive in most situations rather than passive.
    • Fearlessly accept the challenge when faced with scary situations. 
  • Excitement = Fear
    • You experience the same symptoms when you’re excited as you do when you’re fearful of a situation.
      • The difference is that fear happens when you try to avoid a situation. Excitement happens when you are aggressively looking forward to it.
  • When faced with a situation that causes fear, think about the worst thing that can happen.
    • This helps put things in perspective. Nothing is a matter of life and death. You’ll survive whatever is causing you to feel nervous. 

Chapter 14

  • Bring out the feeling of success by thinking of the times you achieved something great.
    • Focus on feeling that same feeling you experienced in the moment of achievement. 
    • The opposite of this is something that we all do well, which is worrying.
      • You think of something bad happening, then you visualize it, then the feeling of fear and anxiety kicks in.
      • Try to do the opposite of this to generate the successful feeling.
  • The way to combat negative feelings is to concentrate on positive visuals and imagery.
    • Trying to resist worrying doesn’t work. You have to replace negative feelings with positive visuals from the past or positive visuals of the future.
    • Fill the mind with positive mental imagery.

Chapter 15

  • Always have goals you’re striving for. Always!
    • This helps to keep your mind focused and positive as you go for what you want.
    • If you don’t have active goals, you get in a rut mentally because you’re just spinning your tires.
      • You get bored. You get complacent. You don’t have anything that you’re working towards.