If you're happy and you know it, tell your face!

So you know from my recent blogs that you have a "steersman" inside you to help you make any changes about yourself you don't like.

You know you are engineered by the Creator to be great and do great things for Him.  That you are worthy.  And that you can de-hypnotize yourself from any limiting beliefs that hold you back from achieving your purpose and dreams.  Visualizing, the language of your Creative Mechanism, is one great way to do that.

But what are some other ideas for changing our stinkin' thinkin'?  Or, to put it bluntly, how can you cut out the crappy things you're telling yourself and be nice for goodness sake!

Here are some thoughts Maxwell Maltz shares on happiness that I think will help you and I to be nice to ourselves.

1.  Happiness is simply a state of mind where our thinking is pleasant a good share of the time.

2.  We think better, perform better, feel better, and are healthier when we are happy.

3.  Happiness is a mental habit, a mental attitude, and if it is not learned and practiced in the present it is never experienced.  It cannot be made contingent upon solving some external problem.  BECAUSE…when one problem is solved another appears to take its place.  Life is a series of problems.  If you are to be happy at all, you must be happy – period!  Not happy “because of.”

4.  “The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.”  Robert Louis Stevenson

5.  Every day is a mixture of good and evil – no day or circumstance is completely 100% “good.”

6.  Be like a squirrel hoarding chestnuts, store up moments of happiness and triumph so that in a crisis we can draw upon these moments for help and inspiration.

Here are 8 affirmations from the book for us to say WITH FEELING over the next 21 days:

1.  I will be as cheerful as possible.

2.  I will try to feel and act a little more friendly toward other people.

3.  I am going to be a little less critical and a little more tolerant of other people, their faults, failings, and mistakes.  I will place the best possible interpretation upon their actions.

4.  Insofar as possible, I am going to act as if success were inevitable, and I already am the sort of personality I want to be.  I will practice “acting like” and “feeling like” this new personality.

5.  I will not let my own opinion color facts in a pessimistic or negative way.

6.  I will practice smiling at least 3 times during the day.

7.  Regardless of what happens, I will react as calmly and as intelligently as possible.

8.  I will ignore completely and close my mind to all those pessimistic and negative “facts” which I can do nothing to change.

Mark your calendar and see how your "happiness quotient" is from saying these 21 days from now.  I'd love to hear what changes you, or others, have noticed.  (You don't have to wait 21 days to comment.)

Remember, if you're happy and you know it tell your face!

drawing by my son, Wesley!

Steer your way to success

As you remember from my last post, I started sharing my thoughts on the book Psycho-Cybernetics.  I promised to cover self-image, and how we have the power to change it.

But, first, you're probably wanting to comment, what the heck is Psycho-Cybernetics?!  Glad you asked!  Cybernetics comes from a Greek word which means literally, “the steersman.” Think of sailing ships.  And psycho deals with the mind.  I like Maltz' distinction between servo-mechanisms that are constructed (think of a torpedo) and automatically "steer" their way to a goal, target, or "answer" and the human brain.  He calls what God created in us the Creative Mechanism.  And even though we are created to achieve, he makes it very clear that we are not machines, but that we have a machine within us in which we use.  

Think of it this way:  machines, or animals for that matter, cannot select their own goals….man can! We create our own success. And if we learn how to "steer" our "steersman", we'll get there even faster! But it's going to take some work.

We've all heard the term "Garbage in. Garbage out." That can be applied to your Creative Mechanism. If, a traumatic event, or person feeds us bad information that is not the truth, then that negative input will skew the path to our target. I remember being teased in grade school for wearing glasses and being underdeveloped in a certain area of my body. Those lies had an effect on me and shaped my self-image making me feel inferior, unloved, undeserving...basically unworthy.  Over the years I've struggled to peal away those lies, like shedding unwanted yet familiar layers, and replace them with the truth, knowing that I have been “designed for success” by my Creator.  Now I know that the old picture of myself as unworthy is wrong and does not come from God but the Enemy.

I've learned from so many great people that failure is a requirement of success, not an either/or option.  Just because I failed at something, that did not make me a failure. It is our perspective on what happens that matters more than the event itself.   Orrin Woodward says that the event only happened once, but what we tell ourselves about it happens many times.

Maxwell Maltz, M.D. was a plastic surgeon, who searched to answer these questions about self-image in his book: "How does the self-image exert its influence, how <does> it create a new personality, what happens inside the human nervous system when the self-image is changed".  He later said that the key to human behavior is the self-image.  "Change the self-image and you change the personality and the behavior."  (For more details you've got to read the book.)

Ok, but how can we change our self-image?!

With pictures.

Don't like the current picture of some part of yourself.  Change the picture.  Not with plastic surgery, but with mental pictures and exercises he gives in the book. Mental pictures, often called visualization, give us the chance to “practice” new traits and attitudes, that we couldn't normally do.  Maltz said,  "If we picture ourselves performing in a certain manner, it is nearly the same as the actual performance.  Mental practice helps to make perfect."

There's a great story of a championship weight-lifter who was told by a hypnotist that he could not lift a pencil from a desk.  Even though he could normally lift a 400 lb weight over his head, when he tried he could not lift up the pencil!  Wow! 

Key Point:  even though the power to do something is within us, we have limiting beliefs that prevent us from achieving that thing because we don't know the ability is there. 

So should we all run to our local hypnotist?  Not necessarily.  Is there a way we can hypnotize ourselves?  Actually, Maltz said we should "dehypnotize" ourselves.

Here's how he said to do that..."within you, whoever you may be, regardless of how big a failure you may think yourself to be, is the ability and the power to do whatever you need to do to be happy and successful.  Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible.  This power becomes available to you just as soon as you can change your beliefs.  Just as quickly as you can dehypnotize yourself from the ideas of "I can't," "I'm not worthy," "I don't deserve it" and other self-limiting ideas."

That's why I continue to put life-changing information into my Creative Mechanism.  I think everyone who's interested in living the life they're meant to live rather than living the life I can barely afford should.  But that's for another time to discuss. ^_^

Repeat after me out loud:

I am not "inferior."

I am not "superior."

I am simply "Me."

I am "worthy".

I "deserve" it.

I "can.................................."

Enjoy the video and I hope you Resolve

to change!

P.S.  Here's another great resource for 

change 90 Day Mental Fitness Challenge

   

 

 

Put on your ruby slippers

I'm not perfect.

And I'm not saying I have it all together...or even halfway together.

But in my quest for a meaningful blog, I want to share some things with you from a book that is very meaningful to me, and my hope is that you will glean some great nuggets to apply to your life as well.

The book is Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, M.D., F.I.C.S.

This wasn't a book I directly picked out, although I had heard of it years ago (it was written in 1960- Ha! it's older than me!)  It came to me as part of my monthly personal development subscription I get that helps me improve my personal and professional life.

When it came I promptly ignored it, as I was reading 3 or 4 other books at the time of its arrival.  But something about it kept nagging at me to pick it up.  Fast forward a few months later at a business meeting, the key speaker - someone I highly respected - mentioned the book.  He said it talked about how our brains are goal-seeking devices, and that if you give it a challenge or problem it will do whatever it can to accomplish it.  Owning 3 businesses, being a wife and mother, I'm always looking at ways to do something better...even if it's just my tuna casserole.

Now, I read the book, The Ant and the Elephant by Vince Poscente, which is a great parable of the power of the conscious (ant) and subconscious (elephant) mind.  I learned that in a split second the conscious mind triggers 2,000 neurons. But in the subconscious mind 4,000,000,000 (billion) are triggered!  If we could just learn how to align our Ant & Elephant so they travel in the same direction towards the same desired goals that'd be Awesome!!

So, if that speaker (subconsciously) suggested reading Psycho-Cybernetics, I figured it was time.

The preface blew me away!  Seriously.  I knew, after reading those first few pages, that I HAD to blog on it, even if only you, my one follower, would read this.

I don't know about you, but I feel that I'm here for a reason.  God has given me unique gifts and talents, most of which are still to be discovered, and a purpose to apply those towards.  If there's a way to pull back the curtain and see how my mind works so that I can achieve bigger and bigger successes, than I was going to grab ahold of it!  THAT'S what I want to share with you.

But......since this blog is already quite long, it'll have to wait until the next installment.

Next time, I'm going to talk about how critical our self-image is.  How we have a built-in Success Mechanism.  And how we have the power to wield it!  Good news, Dorothy, you had the power within you the whole time!


Until then, know that you will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.  Who is that?  Do you like him/her?  If not, you CAN change your self-image.  So, put on your ruby slippers and let's figure it out together. :)

Action Step:
What's one thing you'd like to change in your life?  Please leave a comment.