Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz (Study Notes)

Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. There's an interesting philosophy, and you'll find it to be true, that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And I want to add that when the teacher is ready, the student appears. The quality of the teacher that you attract into your life is going to be based on the purity of your intent and the quality of student that you are. A lot of times, we want to blame the external world for not giving us the information the way we need, when what we really have to do is we have to remove the layers within ourselves to uncover the teachers that were already there. It's just we didn't notice them, and because of our limited or low level of self-esteem or self-confidence, we did not recognize them as our true teachers.

Now, I'm saying this because this theme and the contents within this book help you realize certain things about how reality works. And it's a model for reality, and everybody sees reality different. But you're interested in getting into a high level of success, so you have attracted this particular type of philosophy, which again, is a philosophy that had spawned a large different groups of sub-niches in the personal development industry. You can look at a lot of different concepts and different exercises and things that people do in the personal development industry, and you could track it back to the origins of this book. So while this book is very deep and there's a lot of information, I pulled out what I feel is the most relevant for those of you that watch my videos to further the discussions that we've already been having.

And what we're really trying to do is remove layers, blind spots, smoke screens, and project outwards pure intent, clear intent, you might say. You want something, you might say you want to achieve a certain level of success, but maybe you don't really want it. Maybe you just think you want it because you see others want it, and you think that that's going to make you happy. Well, when you start to remove these layers, you start to really figure out your self-image. You start to really see yourself.

Now, the truth is that people are always revealing to you where you are. Anytime you get angry at somebody, anytime you look down upon somebody, anytime you think that somebody has done you wrong, the knee-jerk reaction is to blame the other person, is to say it's their fault. The higher, more evolved, realized thing to do, if you're on this journey and you're at that level of understanding, is to look to see where you're doing that same thing that they're doing that you're not aware of, and then systematically work on removing that thing out of your life to stop doing it. Also, anything that you don't like about a person, you're doing yourself.

And if you want to improve your self-image, which is going to create the results that you want, which is going to attract people into your life, which is going to clarify your intent, you're going to attract the right teachers, you're going to attract specifically what you say you want consciously, then you have to remove these layers and you have to come to peace and understand that the external world is a projection of your internal state. And you need to stop fighting the external. You need to say that the external is revealing to you where you need to work on. And then you'll realize that everyone is the teacher. And when you recognize that, you'll not only value people more, but you'll value your time more, you'll value yourself more, you'll discover what it is you really want, and then you'll go to work towards achieving those goals, and you'll raise the bar higher and higher and higher.

And underlining that whole process of doing that is this philosophy right here that I've extracted from the book. This process, and it's a five-step process, and it encompasses, and we're going to go deep on it, everything that I just mentioned right now. So, number one is to conduct an accurate inventory and analysis of the contents of your self-image. The self-image is stored in the subconscious mind. We can alter the self-image and we can project outwards the self-image that is going to attract to us, but is going to clarify our intent, and it's going to automatically get us to take action through the subconscious means to produce the results we want.

Number two is, identify erroneous and restrictive programming embedded in your self-image and systematically alter it to better suit your purposes. Then use your imagination to reprogram and manage your self-image, and use your imagination in concert with your self-image to effectively communicate with your servo mechanism so that it acts as an automatic success mechanism, moving you steadily towards your goals, including getting back on course when confronted with obstacles. Effectively use, finally, your servo mechanism as something like a giant search engine to provide precisely the idea, information, or solution you need for any particular purpose.

So, the automatic success mechanism and the servo mechanisms are your subconscious mind. Your intent, or your conscious mind, or your conscious mind specifically can control where the subconscious mind's energies are directed. But if there's conflicting ideologies and conflicting self-image projected from the subconscious, just built from past situations and past experiences, then you're going to experience frustration, fear, guilt, confusion, because there is no alignment, or very little alignment, between the conscious wanting of something and the subconscious self-image.

What we want to do is we want to get our conscious mind in alignment with our subconscious mind, because then it is going to increase our focus so we can be able to tap into specifically what areas we need to, and the vast search engine of knowledge and repository and data that's contained from all the reference experiences you have in your life that is stored within your subconscious mind to pull out the specific ideas, information, or action items or solutions to help you navigate through reality to produce the result that you want.

So, let's start with the first one. First step is to conduct an accurate inventory and analysis of the contents of your self-image. You act and feel not according to what things are really like, but according to the image your mind holds of what they are like. So, in other words, nothing in life has any meaning until you give it meaning. You can look at the same situation, the same circumstance, and you could give that same circumstance to four or five different people, and all of them are going to interpret it differently. Now, provided if they had the same kind of experiences in life, they might have similarities. But if they grew up in totally different environments, had totally different upbringings, had totally different stimulus, different self-images of themselves, then whatever that circumstance, they're going to interpret it different.

Failure, for example, is interpreted totally different by the successful entrepreneur than the entrepreneur that never tends to get their business in a place of success. Failure in sales is interpreted a lot different by the successful salesperson than the salesperson who never makes quota. The successful salesperson might see failure as optimization data. They might see it as objective data. They don't see it as something that makes them want to give up. They see it as an opportunity to tweak their position, tweak their script, to adjust their body language, tonality, to convey the message to a different audience. The list goes on and on. But someone who doesn't see failure from that light might see it as a blow to their ego, and it might actually make it harder for them to get up and make the next pitch or to look for the next prospect.

You have certain mental images of yourself, your world, and the people around you, and you behave as though these images were truth, the reality, rather than things they represent. One of the best ways to look at the external world, the people around you, your circumstances, is as a mirror revealing to you what you are projecting outwards. A lot of times, when we have disputes with people, we like to blame them. We don't take responsibility. We fail to realize that we created that situation. And when we're always blaming people, we are not looking to see how we are doing that same thing that they're doing in a various shape or form in different areas of our lives. People are always revealing to us about ourselves. Therefore, everybody in front of you who does you right and does you wrong is your teacher.

Everybody wants to attract the best teachers, the best mentors, but they're not willing to take the moment to recognize that the best teachers and mentors are already in front of them right now. They're the ones that reveal to you your insecurities. They're the ones that make you feel bad. They're the ones that pick on you because they tell you through their actions that you need to work on yourself, that you are constantly maybe putting yourself in situations where you allow others to walk all over you. And while there are situations that are beyond your control, you'll find this to be true for a lot of people. A lot of people find themselves in relationships that are undesirable, undesirable business circumstances and situations, and they'll constantly repeat the cycle over and over again. And you wonder why. One of the reasons why is because they have a low self-image, and they might not admit it, or they might not be fully aware of it, because the self-image was programmed at maybe earlier stages in life. And until they go to work on it, they're not able to uncover how this is true. But when they go to work on it, and when they resolve the matters, they start to not have those circumstances show up. They start to detect when people are going to do things to them that are undesirable, and they'll end the relationship, or they won't even engage with that person in the first place.

The way to reprogram your subconscious mind, or the self-image that's in your subconscious mind, one way is by using your creative imagination. Creative imagination is not something referred to or reserved for the poets, the philosophers, and inventors. It enters into our every act, for imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination. This is why you'll see athletes and their coaches work together with visualization exercises. The athletes are told to visualize themselves performing and performing at a high level on game day. Professional speakers do this also. They visualize themselves addressing the audience before they do. They visualize the audience receiving them really well. What this does is it creates a certain connection in the nervous system where it doesn't know, where your subconscious doesn't know if that's real or not. All your subconscious knows is that's how you perform. You perform optimally, and that optimal performance that is imagined vividly through the imagination is accepted as fact by the subconscious.

Most of us in this world have negative self-talk, and negative self-talk is actually one of the best opportunities to reorganize, to readjust, to recreate our self-image. If you recognize our negative self-talk, not only just about ourselves, but how negatively we talk about others, we'll start to recognize that we are imprinting that negative talk, or whatever it is we're talking about negatively, deep into our own subconscious mind and programming our own self-image. Your subconscious mind does not know the difference between real and not real, and it simply responds to whatever stimulus that the conscious mind gives to it. And with the repetition of negative self-talk, the subconscious mind goes and creates a low-level negative self-image. This is why it's best to refrain from negativity, gossip, talking bad about others, and instead look at others as your teacher. They're revealing to you about yourself, revealing to you where you're doing these things that you might be angry at them about.

Finding your best self. The aim of self-image psychology is to not create a fictitious self, which is all-powerful, arrogant, egotistical, all-important. Such an image is an inappropriate and unrealistic as the inferior image of self. Our aim is to find the real self and to bring our mental images of ourselves more in line with the objects they represent. So, in other words, we don't want to look around and see what everyone else is doing and try to become like other people. What we want to do is we want to see how we resonate with certain aspects of different people and ask ourselves, why is it that we gravitate towards certain things of another person? If we have a lower level of self-esteem, we find ourselves trying to copy the other person. If we have a high level of self-esteem, we'll start to say that we want to incorporate the best aspects of that person into our own self-image so we can become more of the essence of what that person represents.

Essentially, what you want to do is become your best self, and you do this by dividing yourself up into all your areas of your life and making improvements, some incremental and some quantum, in each of those areas of your lives. By looking around at the external world and noticing what you're gravitating towards, you might find a communicator that is really masterful and say, "I want to be able to communicate like that person." And the reason why I like to communicate like that person is because that person has a really good energy, really good tonality, and a really good ability to articulate exactly what it is that they're trying to say in a way that really helps the listener understand and performs internal restructuring of thinking, which creates behavioral change that's very specific. Once you get that down, then you go to work on yourself so that you can become like that element or that essence of that person, which is really built on the foundation of you.

Another example would be fitness. Rather than looking at another person who appears to be really fit and saying, "I want to be like that person," the reality is you can never really be like that person. But what you can do is use that as a model. Perhaps they have a certain kind of physique that is a certain level of body fat percentage, or a certain level of aesthetic look to them. And then what you do is you go and work and build yourself up to bring out the best in you, but not being upset when you can't look like that person, because that would reveal a lower self-image. But rather, recognizing that you're making progress every day, and you're improving, and you're getting to the higher level of essence which that person represents in the external. If you do it this way, you're going to be more motivated. You're going to be looking at feedback as objective, and you're going to be looking at failure or not achieving the goals through trial and error as data on what you need to optimize.

Here's an exercise: Set aside a period of 30 minutes each day where you can be alone and undisturbed. Relax yourself and be as comfortable as possible. Now, close your eyes and exercise your imagination. Number one: See yourself acting and reacting appropriately, successfully, ideally. It doesn't matter how you acted yesterday. You do not need to try to have faith. You will act in an ideal way tomorrow. Your nervous system will take care of it if you continue to practice. It is the repetition that programs your subconscious mind, and it is the repetition of successful imagery and successful vivid self-talk and imagination that imprints those kind of behaviors in the subconscious mind, which manifests itself automatically as someone being natural and good at what they do.

Next, make these pictures as vivid and detailed as possible. The way to do this is to pay attention to small details, sights, sounds, objects in your imagined environment. This exercise builds new memories or stores data in the midbrain and central nervous system. It builds a new image of self. After practicing it for a long time, you will be surprised to find yourself acting differently, more or less automatically and spontaneously, without trying.

One of the things that I got from that book, that I did a discussion on, The Charisma Myth, was the three components of charisma: power, presence, and warmth. What I did for the weeks to follow, and I still do it, is to constantly, with everything I do, observe to make sure that I'm incorporating all three elements in everything that I do: power, presence, and warmth. In the beginning, it seemed kind of hard, but over time, it almost felt like there was this unconscious process that was always gauging and correcting myself to help me adjust and calibrate to the positions of power, presence, and warmth at the same time. The reason why this happens is precisely because of this: as you do the repetition, your subconscious mind goes and adjusts thousands and thousands of things automatically to present those three components at a really high level. And because there's another aspect of my brain dedicated to constantly thinking about that, I can keep raising it up higher and higher and higher. Most people don't recognize that they can focus on a few things with everything they do, and if those things are high-level enough, they will alter a lot of different behaviors.

For example, let's say you want to improve your ability to communicate or public speaking. If you focus on the three elements of power, presence, and warmth, then you're going to make sure that when you're communicating, you speak clear, concise, and to the point. That would represent power. You'll make sure that you are speaking in a way where it doesn't sound like you're talking down to people, you're speaking with people, and you're connecting, and you're using certain words to help the other person you're communicating with feel understood. You'll demonstrate compassion in your voice. That would be the warmth aspect. And presence would be you reading the cues of who you're communicating with and then adjusting the conversation or what you're saying to match the other person. You're feeling them, and you're in the moment, and you're not being distracted by the environment.

Now, if you have to think about all the subcomponents that are related to the power aspect of communication, or the warmth, or the presence aspect of the communication, it could be too overwhelming. You can get in your head, and you can come off as being inauthentic. But if you focus on the three high levels, all these other behaviors, these sub-behaviors, these nuances, with time will be adjusted through the subconscious. So that's another practical example of that visualization: visualizing yourself performing at a high level when you're communicating, doing power, presence, and warmth, prior to your events, whenever you have to engage in public speaking, and so forth, can be really beneficial because, like I said, the subconscious doesn't really know the difference between reality and imagination. And if you, through repetition, over and over again, imagine yourself performing a certain way, it will become easier to perform that way, just through the habits and the automatic adjustments that are provided by the subconscious mind when you're in the actual situation.

Next, identify erroneous and restrictive programming embedded in your self-image and systematically alter it to best suit your purposes. Now, the key with Psycho-Cybernetics is you have to know exactly what you want. So you must have a goal. You must know specifically what you want, and you have to give that instruction to the subconscious mind. Then, as you navigate reality, you'll see that there's going to be tons of data either presented to people or circumstances that are going to reveal to you if you're moving towards your goal or you're moving away from your goal. And you're going to get it through hunches, inspirations, insights, feelings. And then what you're going to want to do is you want to take action based on it. And you also want to note any types of errors of thinking.

For example, if you want to have success in business, and you want to hit a high level of success in business, then you have to become a value creator. So your subconscious mind is going to get you to pay attention to any types of misconfiguration or erroneous programming embedded in you that is preventing you from being a value creator. When you have conversations with people, you're going to be noticing that you're not going to feel right if you're not providing real value to them. When you are doing something like you're doing your work, you're going to find yourself gravitating towards doing tasks that produce higher levels of value because your subconscious mind recognizes that value, when put out in the external world, is going to return in success, monetary means or whatever, because whatever you put out in value, you get back. And your subconscious mind knows that. And you'll be able to pick up on the things that you do, or your responses, or your prejudices, or whatever, that go against creating value, and you're going to want to note these things. You want to write them down, and you want to do specific visualization and exercises. And I'm not going to get into too much detail as to different kinds of exercises. Many books show you how to optimize very specific behaviors that are revealed as inefficient behaviors through the subconscious. But the repetition of doing that reprograms you so that you project more clarity outwards, more better pure intent, and you automatically do what you should be doing, which is then going to result in you getting what you want, or increase the likelihood that you're going to get what you want.

Your subconscious is on your side when you have clear intent and you know exactly what you want. It's going to be easier to identify the erroneous behaviors, the erroneous negative programming that you have within you. You can always tell when a person is clear on their goals based on how insatiable they are on personal development, because they recognize that they can't just get what they want because they say what they want. They have to evolve to become the person that is in alignment with that goal. And if their goals are really high, and this is why you should set your goals really high, because when you do that, you're going to go to work and discover so many more optimizations than everyone else, because your subconscious mind is really going to take this stuff seriously.

So, let's talk about this for a moment. The unhappy failure type personality cannot develop a new self-image by pure willpower or by arbitrarily deciding to. There must be some ground, some justification, some reason for deciding that the old picture of self is an error and that the new picture is appropriate. You cannot merely imagine a new self-image unless you feel that it is based upon truth. So, if you see yourself achieving a high level of success, or I should say, if you want to achieve a high level of success, but every time you sit down and you say, "Well, I'm going to work towards this goal," you feel a lot of self-doubt or insecurities come up, then you're really going up against the self-image that you have of yourself, which is a lower self-image, which is not in alignment with that goal. And you have to look at it as an opportunity, because that lower self-image, or those feelings that you get, are revealing to you about the things that you need to work on. So, note how you respond to what people say. Note how you respond to different circumstances, because those notes are going to reveal to you what you need to work on. When you work on those, you're going to find that it's easier to imagine yourself achieving that goal that you want, and then you're really going to impress that on the subconscious mind, and then you're going to get further optimizations, further insights to help you move forward towards the goals.

So, we have to do certain things. We have to remove emotional scars. We have to dehypnotize ourselves from false beliefs, because all of these act as roadblocks and smoke screens from living the life we really want. So, let's talk about removing emotional scars. Many people have inner emotional scars who have never suffered physical injuries, and as a result, on personality, the result on personality is the same. These people have been hurt or injured by someone in their past. To guard against this future injury from that source, they form a spiritual callus, an emotional scar, to protect their ego. This scar tissue, however, not only protects them from the individual who originally hurt them, it protects them against all other human beings. An emotional wall is built through which neither friend nor foe can pass.

You can tell a person's level of how fast they're going to grow based on their philosophy when it comes to learning. And you know you've got these emotional scars when you tend to disagree with people a lot, when you fail to recognize that no matter how right you are about something, there's probably a situation where that truth is not valid. If you ever study the Kabbalah or the Seven Hermetic Principles, you'll see that all truths are but half-truths. Okay? There have been truths that people have attached to that are no longer valid. There's plenty of them. And in today's world, where everyone and technology is causing people to evolve really fast, what we used to hold on to as truth is no longer true. And those that continue to hold on to the old truths find themselves frustrated and really trying to protect a self-image that is a lower evolution of humanity. So you have to learn to be at the point of acceptance, awareness, openness to changing who you are, growing who you are. You have to be able to let go. And if you have a lot of emotional scars from your past, you have to look for ways to heal yourself and overcome these emotional scars.

So, let's look at the three rules he discusses. And I recommend reading this book because there's far more on this topic in this book. The three rules for immunizing yourself against emotional scars to prevent them from happening: Number one is, be too big to feel threatened. Observe yourself to see if you're offended by what people say to you. If people disagree with you or they comment negatively about you, and you take it personally and you think about it a lot, not only are you creating that emotional scar, but you're further building upon and adding more layers to the past emotional scars that were generated prior. And you need to go back to those times in life where you had those emotional scars formed, and you know, you have to work with someone on this, and you have to heal those. Or you could heal them yourself if you know how to do this by rewriting the stories. You know, I mentioned this a lot in my videos: nothing in life has any meaning unless you give it meaning. That overriding truth in principle will help you recognize that no matter what happened to you in your past, the meaning that you gave to it, the negative meaning, was just a meaning that you decided to give to it, either because others were giving that same meaning, or you just didn't know any better. And when you gave it that meaning, it created the self-image as a result of that meaning. And you can just give it whatever meaning you want. Going back to rejection again in sales, when somebody rejects you, you can look at it as optimization data and what you need to do to adjust your pitch and so forth, versus looking at it as a blow to an ego. Two totally different meanings, but one has the ability to get you the result, and one to move you away from it.

So, observe if you have too thin of a skin and you're constantly feeling threatened that people are going to make fun of you and things like that, because that would be an indication of low self-image. Then you would want to put yourselves in situations and scenarios where you improve your self-image. And you also want to do these visualization exercises to rewrite these stories. And you want to get good at having conversations with yourself. A lot of people want to improve their communication skills because they want to communicate well with others. Well, the most important person you can communicate with is yourself. If you can persuade yourself, and that's why I recommend you learn persuasion and communication from a persuasion perspective, copywriting and things like that, because then you'll learn how to persuade yourself. You'll learn how to communicate with yourself. A lot of people don't like the sound of their own voice. That's just another layer of lower self-image that's preventing you from one of the biggest opportunities, which is to be able to use your own voice and your own communication to rewrite your own programming, which is actually one of the things I do with these videos. I watch my own videos because I put the content out there, and I teach it in a way that I want to be taught to emphasize the lessons that I want to be further emphasized in me, in me, because I recognize that you can always learn something even more.

The enemies for learning are number one: "I already knew that." Number two: "I disagree." Disagree comes from the emotional scars and the resistance to wanting to grow. And the "I agree," or "I should say," the "I already know what this person's talking about," or "I already know this," comes from an egotistical perspective and misinformation, misguided understanding that there are layers of depth through even any kind of concepts. And those that really understand that can read a book over and over and over and over again, and they'll get more and more deeper and deeper meanings. They can have a conversation with anyone and learn tons of things. Okay? One of the things I do is when I find myself around somebody that has success in a certain area that I want to incorporate in what I do, maybe they're really good at sales, maybe they're really good at leadership, or whatever, I will ask them questions. And if they give me like one or two paragraph answers, I will sit there and I'll take my notebook and I'll take out a mind map and I will deconstruct those paragraphs, one or two paragraphs, for two to three hours to learn the depth and magnitude. And even then, I'll just be scratching the surface, because there's so many variations, there's so much nuance, there's so many aspects that's actually developed through the belief that you don't know everything, and what you know about at a conscious level, you could know more about.

So, all these things are related to higher levels of self-image that I've incorporated in myself, and not feeling threatened by what people say, because again, going back to what I said earlier, people are always revealing to you about yourself. If you recognize that, then you recognize that while some people, you know, might be malicious and they're trying to say things to hurt you, whatever they're revealing to you is your ability to get hurt over what they say. I mean, really, at the end of the day, if someone says something to you and it hurts you, you should be dedicating the next weeks and months to overcome the actual low level of self-image that you have on yourself, that you'll allow what people say to hurt you. And look at all the different ways that you can overcome it, and really dedicate and make it a practice to overcome it. And then, when you find yourself people saying that kind of stuff to you again, you're not even, it's not even going to hit your awareness like right now.

Now, there's certain things that people can say to me now that used to bother me back then, but it's almost like when they communicate to me, it's like my mind just blanks. It doesn't even register what they said, because my subconscious mind does not see that as relevant information. My brain does not want to process it, because I'm interested in processing information that is going to help me move towards my goal, and it's going to help those that I'm around move towards their goal in a win-win way, and I don't want to hear irrelevant information. So, if someone's going to say negative things or whatever, it doesn't, it really doesn't hit my awareness, and it's not forceful, it's automatic through improving these areas.

Next is, self-reliant, responsible attitude that makes you less vulnerable. When you take responsibility for everything that happens to you in your life, then you consciously pick and choose every person you hang around with, every environment you place yourself with. You analyze, you think long-range, you look at all the possible scenarios that could play out before you place yourself in there, because you take responsibility. When you have a business, for example, you take responsibility for everything that happens with your employees and contractors. You don't blame them when things don't go right. That would indicate a low level of self-esteem. And when you have a low level of self-esteem and you project blame onto your staff and whoever else, your clients, etc., what do you think your partners and your employees and your contractors think about you? They're just going to get what they want out of you, and they're going to leave you because they don't see you as a leader. So you can never ever project that you don't see yourself as self-reliant and responsible for everything that's within your awareness, because not only does it work as a disadvantage, because essentially you are reprogramming or you're further embedding a low level of self-image on yourself, but you're reinforcing low-level self-image in others and the behaviors that spawn from that.

Next is, relax away emotional hurts. One of the reasons why we get really tense and threatened is because we're too stuck in our head. When somebody says something to you, again, I said this before, nothing has meaning unless you give it meaning. And when you have goals, your subconscious mind goes to work to help you figure it out. It's the conscious mind that gets offended by what somebody says and keeps thinking about it. And it's like, "Oh, this person said this." Now, part of the elements might come from the subconscious, like low-level self-esteem and stuff like that, but it's really the conscious mind that picks up on what is said to you and constantly replays it in the brain, or constantly argues with yourself in the brain, or wants to fight the other person, and so forth.

So, if you're relaxed, and if you try to relax, ensure that every day, all the stuff that I'm talking about, everything I talk about in these videos, you're doing it from a relaxed perspective. You're not doing it from this tense, pushing, and forceful perspective, because then you're just going to imprint that success comes with all this force and hardship into your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind is going to manifest that. So, what we want to do is you want to relax away the emotional hurts. You want to just be relaxed in general. You're going to find that you're not going to take offense to things if you're relaxed, if you're calm. That's why people who need vacations and they're always tensed up, they're always on edge, no matter what you say to them, they'll get angry because their conscious mind is over-analyzing, over-thinking, like just way it's going off, and they're just not allowing the subconscious mind to do the work.

You see, our subconscious mind is far more intelligent and has access to all this information that you've been exposed to for your entire life. And you can tap into that through relaxation by giving it a clear mental picture of what you want. You read your affirmations in the morning and evening, and you think about your goals once in a while throughout the day. But then what happens is you let go and you trust that your subconscious mind is going to go to work on it. And I'll give you an example. I mean, like when I make these videos here, I don't have an actual script. I just release and allow my subconscious to flow out the information in the best way possible. If I had too much of a structure, it's going to come off as being so forceful. I wouldn't be able to talk, create a video, you know, every week or every other week, an hour and a half. It would take me forever to create these videos, but they're easier to create because I practice this. I practice to just be relaxed. And while my words might not come out perfect, and I'll make mistakes and so forth, for the most part, it tends to be good information because I allow the information to flow from my subconscious.

So, next is to dehypnotize yourself from false beliefs. Okay, so you have belief systems, and you believe their reality to work a certain way. If you're going after success, you're going to have to change your belief systems. And most people who have a high level of success think radically different, have totally different belief systems than everyone else. Their belief systems are that of abundance, that of taking action, that of seeing everything as stimulus from the environment as telling them about themselves, a belief of responsibility, a belief that they can do things that other people can't do. They have high levels of self-esteem and self-confidence that are built on these belief systems that were either belief systems that were embedded in them because they had great stimulus when they were kids, or they learned through processes like this to recreate the belief systems over time, and thus get them to tap into the subconscious abilities to do optimal behaviors which produce the results.

So, we want to remove any types of belief systems that don't serve us. Those are false beliefs. Anything that disempowers you, that makes you feel weak, that causes you to think low of yourself, low of others, are false, false belief systems that need to be modified. And this feeling of inferiority comes about for just one reason: we judge ourselves and measure ourselves not against our own norm or power, but against some other individual's norm. When we do this, we always, without exception, come out second best. You always want to improve yourself. You don't want to compare yourself to other people. You want to look at certain qualities that another person has, and it can inspire you, but you don't want to become like other people, because you'll never become like another person. And even if you try to mimic another person, you're just going to be, you know, like a copycat, and people always want to deal with number one, they don't want to deal with the copycat. So it's best for you to be your own person and incorporate the essence and elements of people that you admire into your own self-image, into your own personality, and so forth. Stop measuring yourself against their standards. You are not them, and you can never measure up. Neither can they measure up to yours, nor should they. Once you see this simple, rather self-evident truth, accept it and believe it, your inferior feelings will vanish.

Again, physical relaxation plays a key role in the dehypnotization process. When the hypnotist, let's say you go to a hypnotist, they get you to relax right away because when you're under a process of relaxation, or when you're relaxed, you're more allowing, you're more accepting, and they can then influence your subconscious mind. So on the flip side, you have to make sure that you are in relaxed states. When you're in a relaxed state, that whatever information is within your awareness when you are relaxed is information you want going into your subconscious mind. Okay? Your subconscious mind will take information as is. You can consciously program your subconscious mind, or you can allow the environment and media and so forth to program your subconscious mind. So what's interesting is that people like to, at the end of the day, relax and watch TV. What they're failing to recognize is they're relaxing, they're watching TV, and the information from TV is going into the subconscious mind and programming it. Okay? That's a very important understanding. They're better off actually watching TV tense, because they're less likely to get that information going into their subconscious mind. But because the relaxation is happening while they're at the end of the day, and they're consciously choosing it, they're sitting there, and just information is just going into their brain and incorporating into their psychology, and they're just allowing it to happen.

Next, use your imagination to reprogram and manage your self-image. As we talked about this, understanding the psychology of the self can mean the difference between success and failure, love and hate, bitterness and happiness. The discovery of real self can rescue a crumbling marriage, recreate a faltering career, transform victims of personality failure on other planes. Discovering your real self means the difference between freedom and the compulsions of conformity.

So, let's look at how to unlock your real personality. When you think, when you become too consciously concerned about what others think, when you become too careful to consciously try to please other people, when you become too sensitive to the real or fancied disapproval of other people, then you have excessive negative feedback inhibition and poor performance. So, what's preventing you from presenting your best self is inhibition. There are layers holding yourself back. You can always tell with a person if they're not being themselves because they're tense in their body language, or their voice tonality is not smooth. And you know this is why you want to record yourself. Because even when I started making my own videos, or a lot of things that I do, I record myself, because then I can see where I'm holding myself back. It's very apparent to myself. A lot of people don't like to record themselves because they don't like to hear themselves, but they're really missing out on the opportunity to optimize themselves. So you really have to think about, if you want to optimize yourself, then recording yourself is probably one of the best things you can do, because you can see where you're holding yourself back, and then you can, you know, note that and go to work on those areas.

And here are some practice exercises: Don't wonder in advance what you're going to say. Just open your mouth and say it. Improvise as you go along. And that's, you know, I follow this philosophy. And a lot of you don't know one of the reasons why I make this video is because I want to keep growing my ability to be a great communicator in business. And there are a lot of really tense negotiations and deals and so forth where your presentation skills, your ability to improvise, your ability to communicate, can mean the difference between getting it or not. So I make these videos because they force me to come up on the spot with different concepts and ideas to practice it. A lot of times I don't even know what I'm going to say in the videos. I just use the mind maps as guides, and there's granularity to them, so it allows me to talk a lot longer. And that's why the videos are like an hour and a half or so, or an hour, hour and a half. But this is can be practiced with a lot of areas of your life. When you talk to people, you see somebody interesting, go talk to them. Just open your mouth and start talking. And the first is going to seem kind of weird, and they might even be kind of weirded out, but you have to let go about, let go of the self-image that you have on yourself, which is essentially holding you back, or overthinking, I should say. Getting, allowing the subconscious mind to work is what this does. Your real personality is in your subconscious mind. The optimizations for improvement are found in the subconscious mind. And for most of us, we've had a lot of experience in our lives, and we're actually very high in our abilities, but we allow our conscious mind to throttle those abilities. So improvisation, or you can take improv classes. This is another way of doing this, where you're just, you just have to go up, and they give you scenarios, and you just act based on the scenarios. It will help you with this.

Next, don't plan. Take no thought for tomorrow. Don't think before you act. Act and correct the actions as you go along. This advice may seem radical, yet it actually is the way all servo mechanisms must work. So acting, taking action, is an exercise. When we study too much, when we read too much, when we're constantly thinking too much, we'll find ourselves afraid to take action. We'll be too stuck in our head. We need to break that pattern. It's important to learn, it's important to get new information, and it's also important, because we're talking about behavioral change here, behavioral change towards success, to take action and then recognize that, you know, action's never going to be perfect. There's going to be mistakes, and you're going to correct them afterwards, and you're going to be okay with making mistakes. You have to learn to get better with being okay with making mistakes. You have to learn to take action and then program yourself to act, because when ideas and inspirations and hunches come from the subconscious mind, we need to act upon it quickly and efficiently to further build that passageway of communication between the conscious and the subconscious, to act upon insight and intuition, to connect to those parts of us that has the insight and intuition and act upon it.

Next, stop criticizing yourself. The inhibited person indulges.

In self-critical analysis, continuously after each action, however simple, he says to himself, "I wonder if I should have done that." After he has gotten up the courage enough to say something, he immediately says to himself, "Maybe I shouldn't have said that."

Make a habit of speaking louder than usual and let people know when you like them. Okay, giving compliments to people. Uh, we're afraid to give compliments to people because we're afraid of the response that we get. We have to reduce the fear of the response we get by understanding first that people are revealing to you about yourself, and you can give whatever response you get whatever meaning you want once you really go to work with the stuff.

So, ingredients for the successful type personality and how to acquire them. Sense of direction. All the stuff works. Uh, psycho-cybernetics is essentially based on the philosophy of having a goal because that's when your subconscious mind goes to work to adjust you towards the goal. So, get yourself a goal worth working for. Better still, get yourself a project. Decide what you want out of a situation. Always have something ahead of you to look forward to, to work for, and hope for. Look forward, not backwards. Develop the one of, develop what one of the automobile manufacturers calls the forward look. Develop a nostalgia for the future instead of the past.

Next is understanding. Look for and seek out true information concerning yourself, your problems, other people, or the situation, whether it is good news or bad news. Adopt the motto: "It doesn't matter who's right about what's right." So again, when you're, you know, when people have disputes and issues and companies and so forth, they tend to default to who's right rather than what's right. Train yourself to focus on doing and thinking and acting and communicating what is right rather than who is right because if you communicate what who is right, you are further lowering your self-image.

Okay, as innocent as these behaviors might seem to a lot of people, they fail to recognize that they're further emphasizing and programming themselves to lower self-image. When you focus on who's right rather than what's right, you're giving the power to the external. You're saying that you are a victim as a result of the external, which lowers your self-image.

Courage. Be willing to take to make a few mistakes, to suffer a little pain, to get what you want. Don't sell yourself short. You've got the resources, but you never know you've got them until you act and give them a chance to work for you. A great book to read is "Antifragile" by Nim TB Charity.

Try to develop a genuine appreciation for people by realizing the truth about them. Now, if you see the world as a friendly place and you genuinely, genuinely want to create value for others, and you recognize that you'll be rewarded greatly for your value, so therefore you're constantly looking for ways to do good for others, to value others, and you want to create value even if other people seem cold or angry or whatever, you look beyond that, then you're going to get better optimizations. You're going to relax more because you're not always going to be on the defensive, and you're not going to, you know, become paranoid and so forth.

Take the trouble to stop and think of the other person's feelings, his viewpoints, and desires and needs. You know, not only because it helps improve communication skills, but when you take the time to understand another person's feelings and viewpoints, desires and needs, they open up to you, giving you more information as to what you need to optimize yourself. A lot of times, people who don't want to hear what another person has to say or get angry when a person says something to them because they take it personally, are actually preventing optimizations and insights to flow to them. And so then the other person is just not going to say anything.

We want to get people to open up, and the way to do it is to not be offended by what they're saying, but accept what they're saying and say, "That's their point of view, and I want to know more about their point of view." And their point of view is revealing to me my tolerance level to accept another person's point of view, and revealing to me any kind of nuances that I have in my subconscious or my self-image that I need to work on. Because if you're offended by people and what they say, there's things about you you need to work on so you don't feel that way anymore.

Next, act as if the other people are important and treat them accordingly. Esteem. Stop carrying around a mental picture of yourself as a defeated, worthless person. Stop dramatizing yourself as an object of pity and injustice, either in the words you say to yourself or others, your body language, everything. Use the practice exercise this book to build up an adequate self-image.

Self-confidence. Self-confidence is built upon experience of success. So when you take action, the more actions you take, the more results you get. More results you get, your self-confidence goes up. You can't talk your way to a high level of self-confidence; it's experience. So you have to take action. When we first begin any undertaking, we are less, we are likely to have little confidence because we have not learned from experience that we can succeed. This is true from, true of learning to ride a bike, speaking in public, or performing surgery. Use errors and mistakes as a way of learning and then dismiss them from your mind. Deliberately remember and picture your past successes. Again, we want to tap into those parts that get our subconscious mind to perform successfully.

Self-acceptance. No real, no real success or genuine happiness is possible until a person gains some degree of self-acceptance. Accept yourself as you are and start from there. Okay, accept yourself where you are right now. Accept yourself and then optimize the different aspects of yourself. Learn to emotionally tolerate imperfection in yourself. Okay, there's, everybody's got imperfections, and imperfection is very relative and subjective. Somebody's imperfection can be seen by another person as somebody's strong suit. You know, there might be qualities that you don't like about yourself that others would love to have about you. It's always the case. So self-acceptance keeps us open, it heals those emotional wounds, and allows us to be more present and aware. I mentioned this earlier, becoming more present, aware will allow you to see your environment and people as your teachers. You're not going to see them as your enemies; you're going to see them as your teachers. Accept yourself as you are and start from there. It is necessary to intellectually recognize our shortcomings, but disastrous to hate ourselves because of them, because it further emphasizes lower self-image.

Next, use your imagination and concert with your self-image to effectively communicate with your servo-mechanism so that it acts as an automatic success mechanism, moving you steadily towards your goals, including getting back on course when confronted with obstacles. So refer to as servo-mechanisms. Servo-mechanisms are so constructed so that we automatically steer their way, so they automatically steer their way towards a goal, target, or answer. This new concept does not mean that you are a machine, but you are a physical brain in your bodily functions as body functions as a machine which you operate. This automatic creative mechanism within you can operate in only one way: it must have a target to shoot at. So you must have a specific type of goal. Okay, and there's two kinds of goals you can have: uh, when you know the target or goal and the objective is to reach it and accomplish it, or where the target or answer is not known and the object is to discover or locate. So in other words, finding your purpose and passion and finding your goal, or having a specific goal, either one of these are good because this will start to tune your subconscious mind to move you forward.

Let's talk about the failure mechanism. Just like we talked about the success mechanism, frustration. Hopefulness, frustration is an emotional feel which develops whether some important goal cannot be realized or when some strong desire is thwarted. So if you're feeling frustrated, I would refer back to flow state. Flow is where challenge meets skill. When you onramp yourself into the flow, uh, sweet spot, you're less likely to feel frustration because you have just enough challenge that you are stimulated by it. But if you try to set it too high, you have too high expectations, you're meant with frustration. So it's important to set your goals accordingly and calibrate aggressiveness.

Excessive and misdirected aggressiveness follows frustration. So again, if you stay frustrated for a long time, you're going to start to get angry, you're going to start to take it out on people. And the failure personality type does not direct his aggressiveness towards the accomplishment of a worthwhile goal. Instead, it is used as a self-destructive channel, as ulcers, high blood pressure, worry, excessive smoking, compulsive overwork, or it may be turned upon other persons in the form of irritability, rudeness, gossip, nagging, and fault-finding. A lot of this is about self-reflection, knowing where you are and accepting where you are and making consistent progress.

Insecurity. The feeling of insecurity is based upon a concept or belief of inner inadequacy. If you feel that you are not measure, if you don't, if you feel that you don't measure up to what is required, you feel insecure. Since man is a goal-striving mechanism, the self realizes itself fully only when a man is moving towards something. So if you're moving towards a goal, then you have something to measure up against in everything that you do, and the insecurities start to go away because then you start to look at stimulus or circumstances as objective data to help you move forward.

Loneliness, which is essentially lack of oneness. Doing things that other people are doing, and doing things with other people, and enjoying things with other people, helps us forget about ourselves. In stimulating conversation, in dancing, playing together, or in working together for a common goal, we become interested in something other than maintaining our own shams and, uh, pretenses. So interacting with people is very important because, I mentioned this earlier, people reveal to you about yourself. So it's a great opportunity to connect with a wide array of people so you can get more insightful ideas and inspirations on what you need to work on to grow, to move you forward towards your goal.

Develop some social skills that will add happiness to other people, happiness of other people. So one of the reasons why we develop social skills is to learn how to create value for others. One of the reasons why you improve your communication, persuasion skills is to create better value for others. Some people might see it the other way; it's to get stuff. When you switch it around and you say it's to give stuff, you recognize that the laws of the universe says everything must be reciprocated. There's cause and effect. I mentioned seven hermetic principles: cause and effect. What you put out will come back to you in some shape or form, not necessarily from that source, but from other sources. If you're constantly giving value and providing value, it comes back to you from different places. And the more value you create, and the more magnitude of the value, value, the more concentrate and frequency of delivery of that value and creative ways you come up with to just pump out that value, the more will be returned back to you. And developing social skills helps you learn what value means to others because real value is what others see as value, not what you think value is.

Uncertainty. Uncertainty is a way of avoiding mistakes and responsibility. So uncertainty can be broken down by taking action. When you get an idea that comes from the subconscious mind, act upon it right away. The more you dwell upon things, the more you are further emphasizing uncertainty, and then it goes into your self-image, and then you become the person that has a lot of uncertainty, which then makes you accept failure as something that will prevent you getting from what you want, and just, you know, you just give up.

Resentment. When the failure personality type looks for a scapegoat, to escape, to excuse for his failure, he often blames society, the system, life, and the breaks. Okay, so when you're at this point, you'll start blaming everyone else. You will not look at yourself. You will make very little progress, and you'll keep going downwards. You'll keep going into a place of darkness, and the blame will amplify. You can see this, those that have literally just given up on life, constantly walking around and blaming everyone for everything. They might not have gotten there overnight, but it was a gradual journey. So you have a choice. You can either go either way and observe yourself. You know, because we might do this in different stages of our lives to varying degrees, but there are pathways. You're either going left or right. So if you're going to go down a pathway where and you accept and you start to even subtly blame society and people and system and whatever, know that you're probably going to keep continuing going down that path if you don't make a change, if you don't switch. And that's going to build resentment, and that resentment is going to get embedded into the self-image of your subconscious mind, and it's going to get harder and harder to remove it.

Resentment is an attempt to make our own failures palatable by explaining it in terms of unfair treatment or injustice. Remember that your resentment is not, not caused by other people, events, or circumstances. It is caused by your own emotional response or the meaning you give to it or the story you tell yourself, your own reaction. You alone have the power over this. Okay, there's some people that can have the same circumstances and events happen to them in their lives that other people will build resentment towards, but the other people will feel empowered towards. That's based on either unconsciously or consciously choosing their own reaction or choosing, I should say, an optimal reaction, a reaction that serves them, and thus they don't continue down this path. When this thing happens, they make a quick U-turn and they go back towards the path towards success. And you control it. If you firmly convince yourself that resentment and self-pity are not ways to happiness and success, but ways to defeat and unhappiness.

Emptiness. Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively. That you either have no goal that is important enough to you, or you're not using your talent and efforts striving towards an important goal. It's as simple as that. If you feel empty, you need to set a goal. You need to find that purpose in your life. You should start with that because, remember, I mentioned this earlier, we could either use everything covered in this book, and I'm just scratching the surface here with this video, there's much more to this book. I recommend you read it to move us towards a goal or help us find a goal to move towards.

Let's talk about how to use negative thinking. We are sensitive to the negative to the extent that it alerts us to danger. We recognize the negative for what it is: something undesirable, something we don't want, something that does not bring genuine happiness. Okay, so we can, when you feel negative, it's not about like avoiding it; it's about understanding what it means. Okay, and these are some meanings that you can give to it that are actually empowering. Okay, so feel negative; it's just alerting you of some danger or something undesirable; you just move the other way. We can take immediate corrective action and substitute an opposite factor from the success mechanism. So negative thinking, when you get negative thinking, you can have some tools that can alter the direction that you go on.

So if you want to acquire the habit of happiness, cuz the measure of mental health is a disposition to find good everywhere, said the most famous moralist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. You can always tell a lot about people. One of my favorite questions, were, as soon as I meet someone, is, "I want to know if they see the world as a happy place or a negative place." If they see the world as a happy place, then I want to connect with them further because I know that they've been through hardships, everyone has, but they've managed to figure out ways, stories, and insights to help them see the positive in everything, to find happiness in everything, and I want to know. I'm curious.

So for the next 21 days, here's a good exercise: "I will be as cheerful as possible. I will try to feel and act a little more friendly towards other people. I'm 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 in so far as possible. I'm going to act as if success were inevitable and I already am the sort of person I want to be. I will practice acting like and feeling like this new personality. I will not let my own opinion color facts in a pessimistic or negative way. I will practice smiling at least three times during the day." If you change your physiology, you change your state. Tony Robbins talks about this. Regardless of what happens, I will react as calmly and intelligently as possible because when you are, when you remain calm in a situation, you tap into the subconscious. If you're not calm, too much conscious work is going on, and the power and deep understandings and huge database of insight and ability is stored in the subconscious. I will ignore completely and close my mind to all pessimistic and negative facts which I can do nothing to change.

And then finally, effectively use your servo-mechanism as something like a giant search engine to provide precisely the idea, information, or solution you need for any particular purpose. See, you can choose what meaning you give to things, and you can choose how you interpret information, and you don't have to accept information the way it's given to you. You can evaluate if it fits into moving you forward towards your goal or not. You can evaluate if it fits into optimal, better belief systems that are designed to empower you, to help others, to create value, and so forth.

And here are some questions that whenever you get a belief that pops up that you know is negative, or is somebody's proposing a belief system that doesn't seem right to you, you can question that belief system. And here's some good questions: "Is this belief based upon actual fact, or is it an assumption or false conclusion? Is there any rational reason for such belief? Could it be that I'm mistaken in this belief? Could I come to the same conclusion about some other person in a similar situation?" So if somebody treats you badly, you know, you might label the entire group of people to be that way. That's a good question to ask. "Why should I continue to act and feel as if this were true if there is no reason to believe it?" This is all about thinking critically and rationally about any kind of belief system that you either have or being, or that you are being taught. Remember, ideas are changed not by will, but by other ideas. So when you ask these questions, you can come up with the alternative belief system that's more empowering and accept that as true.

Relax to let your success mechanism work for you. You see, the success mechanism is essentially the subconscious mind. You tune your subconscious mind with conscious thought by having a clear goal, and you get it to work for you to help you move forward. But in order to communicate with the subconscious mind, I mentioned this, you, you have to relax. One of the best things that I do is I spend most of my days focused, concentrate a lot of intellectual things I do in my businesses and so forth, and then, you know, there's growth, uh, issues and problems and challenges that are exciting and I want to solve right away. And the way to solve them is I just stop what I do and I go for a walk. If you read up on, you know, "Deep Work" by, I, I did a video on it, watch that video. All great thinkers and those that were great at solving problems would incorporate, a lot of them would long walks in their day. And when you're walking, you want to let go of all thought. You want to allow your subconscious mind to come up with ideas and insights. And what, what I find is I come up with these amazing ideas and insights because I let my subconscious mind do the work. Around that time, when I go back to my desk, I've got the answer, a very efficient, 80/20, high-level solution to the problem.

Too much effort to consciously bring upon spontaneity. Spontaneity is like destroy, is likely to destroy spontaneous action. It is much easier and more effective to simply define your goal or end result, picture it to yourself clearly and vividly, then simply capture the feeling you would experience if the desirable goal were already an accomplished fact. Then you are acting spontaneously and creatively. Uh, creativity. Then you are using the powers of your subconscious mind. So you have a clear-cut goal as to what you want, and then let go. You're going to get ideas, insights, and then act upon them right away. They're going to feel right. And then what happens is that you form that connection between looking for the idea or insight from your subconscious mind and then having your subconscious mind giving it you right away. You're forming that connection. You're commanding it to give you a highly amazing idea that you were never thought of consciously by logically rationalizing it because your subconscious mind is a repository of so many different reference experiences and variables.

Here are five rules for freeing your creativity machine: Number one, do not worry before you place your bet, not after the wheel. Do your worry, I should say, do your worry before you place your bet, not after your wheels start turning. So, in other words, what this means is you can think whatever you want, just take the action, and once you take the action, let go and observe and be present.

Next, form the habit of consciously responding to the present moment. The greatest amount of data to, to help you pivot and go in the right direction is available in the present moment. We have to constantly be bringing ourselves in the present moment. Going for a walk, for example, brings you into the present moment. Letting go of thoughts and so forth brings awareness into the presence. And when the present, when the awareness is brought into the present, the subconscious mind gives the insights and inspirations. A lot of what I'm saying might sound very repetitive, and actually, I've made a lot of videos on this over the last like couple months, and I'm repeating the information over and over again for a reason because it's the repetition that helps you recognize and helps you understand further and works to rewrite the subconscious mind so that behaviors change. And we constantly have to be reminded to get present. Everyone, I, you know, no matter what high level of success person you meet in your life, they can always get better at being more present. We, that's, that's one of the biggest opportunities: becoming more present.

So next, try to do only one thing at a time because the reality is you can only do one thing at a time. And again, go back to my video of, uh, "Deep Work." Sleep on it. You can be so caught up in what you do that you find yourself just being tense, just, you know, call it a night. You'll find the insight the next day in the morning. One of my favorite things when I get my best insights is in my morning routine when I'm at the gym because after a long day's worth of work, I go to bed, and you know, my mind's still going. Even though if I do my walk and so forth, it's still going. Next day I wake up, my mind is clear. I go to the gym, and everything is giving me insights. People around me, um, my walks, every point of stimulus that I get is giving me insight the next morning.

And then another thing you can do is relax while you work. Okay, so you want to work, and you want to put in a good effort, and you want to work deeply, but you also at the same time want to relax. Remember power, presence, and warmth. Why? Because again, it allows you to tap into your subconscious mind. By relaxing, you can be more present. By relaxing, you can allow your creativity to flow. I can always tell a person who just, you know, produces massive results, everything they touch turns to gold, based on their level of, of relaxation. They have a lot of responsibility, a lot of things that happen to them every day, positive, negative, a lot of responsibility, but yet they're very relaxed because they have somehow figured out that by relaxing and staying relaxed, even though they do a lot of things that might seem intense, they can deal with the dynamics at hand, the present moment, and they can operate effectively.

So finally, let's talk about crises because when you strive for a high goal, you put yourself in uncomfortable situations. You're out of the comfort zone. You're trying to do things that other people wouldn't do. You know, there's a reason why people don't set high goals: is because they don't want to deal with the added pressure, and they don't want to deal with the added stress, and they don't want to look like a failure, and they don't want to make mistakes. They want to learn something new, and they don't want to experience essentially crisis. But crises don't necessarily have to be a bad thing. For example, you can pre-practice. You can visualize yourself going into situations that are very challenging. That's why they do fire drills. They do fire drills because they get the, you know, schools or whatever to exit the building very carefully, calmly, and they, and they reinforce that because they're getting the nervous system of each person to respond a certain way, which is optimal for them in case of the event of the real fire. You can practice this in your mind. You can practice preemptively visualizing yourself dealing really well in a situation of crisis. Crises actually build power. The secret lies in the attitude of fearlessly accepting the challenge and confidently expanding our strength. This means maintaining an aggressive, a goal-directed attitude rather than a defensive, evasive, negative one. And by aggressive, I'm not talking about, you know, forceful; I'm talking about real power, which is really a form of presence also, and direction, and calm, and it's not forceful; it flows through you. The meaning this means maintaining an aggressive, goal-directed attitude rather than a defensive, evasive, negative one. "No matter what happens, I can handle it," or "I can see it through," rather than "I hope nothing happens." The essence of this aggressive attitude is remaining goal-oriented. You keep your own positive goal in mind. You intend to go through this crisis and experience to achieve your goal because if you lose sight of your goal when you're experiencing a crisis, you can become reactive. But if you have your goal, then the cybernetics, all the stuff that we're talking about here, and everything covered in the book will orient you to the best possible actions towards the goal. And you've got to ask yourself, "What is the worst that can possibly happen?" Close scrutiny will show that most of these everyday so-called crisis situations are not life or death matters at all, but opportunities to either advance or stay where you are.

If you want a copy of the mind map, it's in the link in the description. Thank you very much for watching. I will talk to you soon. Take care.