Maxwell Maltz - Psycho-Cybernetics (1960)

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We are built to conquer environment, solve problems, achieve goals, and we find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve.

Maxwell Maltz
Take the trouble to stop and think of the other person's feelings, his viewpoints, his desires and needs. Think more of what the other fellow wants, and how he must feel.

Maxwell Maltz
See yourself reacting to threats, not by running away or evading them, but by meeting them, dealing with them, grappling with them in an aggressive intelligent manner.

Maxwell Maltz
The 'self-image' is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.

Maxwell Maltz
It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.

Maxwell Maltz
We are engineered as goal-seeking mechanisms. We are built that way. When we have no personal goal which we are interested in and which 'means something' to us, we are apt to 'go around in circles,' 'feel lost' and find life itself 'aimless' and 'purposeless'.

Maxwell Maltz
True success and true happiness not only go together but each other enhances the other.

Maxwell Maltz
Adopt the motto: It doesn't matter who's right, but what's right.

Maxwell Maltz
Get yourself a goal worth working for. Better still, get yourself a project.

Maxwell Maltz
We simply must get it through our heads that holding a low opinion of ourselves is not a virtue, but a vice.

Maxwell Maltz
Visualizing, creative mental picturing, is no more difficult than what you do when you remember some scene out of the past, or worry about the future. Acting out new action patterns is no more difficult than deciding, then following through on tying your shoes in a new and different manner each morning, instead of continuing to tie them in your old habitual way, without thought or decision.

Maxwell Maltz
I am a firm believer in 'negative thinking' when used correctly. We need to be AWARE of negatives so that we can steer clear of them. A golfer needs to know where the bunkers and sand traps are - but he doesn't think continuously about the bunker - where he doesn't want to go. His mind glances at the bunker, but he DWELLS upon the green.

Maxwell Maltz
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 upon the goals which 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.

Maxwell Maltz
Fully 95 percent of our behavior, feeling, and response is habitual.

Maxwell Maltz
Happiness is native to the human mind and its physical machine. We think better, perform better, feel better, and are healthier when we are happy.

Maxwell Maltz
Another cause of confusion, and the resulting feelings of nervousness, hurry, and anxiety, is the absurd habit of trying to do many things at one time.

Maxwell Maltz
To really 'live,' that is to find life reasonably satisfying, you must have an adequate and realistic self-image that you can life with. You must find yourself acceptable to 'you.'

Maxwell Maltz
The minute that we change our minds, and stop giving power to the past, the past with its mistakes loses power over us.

Maxwell Maltz
The un-happiest of mortals is that man who insists upon reliving the past, over and over in imagination - continually criticizing himself for past mistakes - continually condemning himself for past sins.

Maxwell Maltz
When we consciously and deliberately develop new and better habits, our self image tends to outgrow the old habits and grow into the new pattern.

Maxwell Maltz
Do your worrying before you place your bet, not after the wheel stops turning.

Maxwell Maltz
Do not say to yourself, 'I am going to act this way tomorrow.' Just say to yourself - 'I am going to imagine myself acting this way NOW - for 30 minutes - today.'

Maxwell Maltz
If you wait until circumstances justify your thinking pleasant thoughts, you are likely to wait forever.

Maxwell Maltz
Change your mental imagery, and the feelings will take care of themselves.

Maxwell Maltz
Happiness is simply a state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant a good share of the time.

Maxwell Maltz
Your present negative beliefs were formed by thought PLUS feelings. Generate enough emotion, or deep feeling and your new thoughts and ideas will cancel them out.

Maxwell Maltz
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.

Maxwell Maltz
When you're not goal-striving, not looking forward, you're not really living.

Maxwell Maltz
Of all the traps and pitfalls in life, self-disesteem is the deadliest, and the hardest to overcome: for it is a pit designed and dug by our own hands, summed up in the phrase, 'It's no use - I can't do it.'

Maxwell Maltz
It is an old psychological axiom that constant exposure to the object of fear immunizes against the fear.

Maxwell Maltz