Getting Better at Life

Getting Better at Life

At the beginning of 2019, I decided to read a book a month, and then on the last day of the month, I would do a podcast/blog post about some ideas that jumped out at me. I really believe that when we share our insights from things that we read, things that we see, things that we experience then all of us can learn life lessons. 

So for the month of January, I chose the New Psycho Cybernetics book written by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. 

Boy, is it a fantastic read! Let's jump in and I'll give you a little bit of background on Dr Maltz.

He was a plastic surgeon. He fixed people's physical defects and helped them to look normal and whole on the outside again. 

But he noticed some interesting things depending on the person after their surgery. Some people came out with a totally different attitude, they acted like a completely different person. And then there were others that acted the same as before their surgery.

In other words, that outward physical appearance had such an effect on them psychologically that they were still living as if they hadn't had surgery at all.

And so it started him down this journey, this path of really thinking about how much mental thought plays a role in our lives. 

I want to share a couple of ideas with you guys that I learned from him that have made a massive difference in my life. 

The first thing that he really introduces to us is self-imposed limits versus being at peak performance. 

There's a chart in the book that covers limiting beliefs and how we set those for ourselves, whether that's because someone said something to us at an early age or even as an adult or whether we just came up with that on our own. Take a look:

credit to Maxwell Maltz, The New Psycho-Cybernetics 

Words spoken have a profound effect on our psyche. 

He talks about how powerful our minds are and introduces the idea of visualization and our "automatic success mechanism" as he calls it.

So we either have an automatic success mechanism or we have an automatic failure mechanism. So depending on what we choose to think about will depend on whether we succeed or whether we fail. 

And if you let that sink in a little bit, we all know that what we think is what we are. But in real life do we put positive or negative into our daily lives? 

On top of that, what we are in the habit of doing or saying to ourselves every single day really adds up in our brains. 

Have you ever seen that picture that goes around on social media every once in awhile? It's a picture of Success on one side, has a straight line with an arrow at the end and is captioned, "what people think it looks like" and then on the other side it also says success but it's a bunch of squiggly, jacked up lines and then finally you get to the arrow at the end. Here it is:

I see a lot of entrepreneurs and business people sharing this image. Why? They are sharing to get a point across. Success is never easy and it certainly isn't a straight line!! That's one thing that we all need to remember in our journeys, nothing and no one is perfect. 

Have you ever met someone and they look like they're very successful and have it all together and you think, "wow, that person is amazing."

They've had that much success, but how did they get there? 

It wasn't without frustrations and disappointments along the way. 

Just knowing that we're going to zig and we're going to zag like in the picture above...and that's okay!

Our negative experiences are helping to contribute to our journey and not inhibiting our journey. All too often we think of failure as something that keeps us from our goal. But that's only true if we let it be. If we learn from the failure and get back up to try again, that failure just contributed to our success!! Are you getting this?!

In order to learn, we have to make mistakes, and then all we do is auto-correct. 

And then you get to where you know what you're doing and then you get to know to where you know what you're doing automatically. 

Your brain just does it by itself. You don't have to think about what you're doing. 

It's like when a baby is learning to walk. They are going to start they are going to fall. A lot.  How many times does that take? 

The baby doesn't sit there and say, oh, well I failed. I'm not even going to try that anymore because it's obviously not for me. Walking is just not for me. 

It’s ludicrous to think that!! We know the baby's going to keep on trying to walk and then it's going to walk and then it's not going to think about walking anymore. 

And yet there's so many times that I can think of in my past that I've tried something once or twice, maybe even three times and thought, maybe this just isn't for me.  I'm not gonna continue on with this because really what's the point? Did I give up too easily?

So he has a great example that I’d like to share with you.  

His story is about a hiker.When he gets out of his vehicle, he picks out a prominent landmark near the car, such as an extra tall tree that can be seen for miles so he can find his car and get back to where he wants to be. When returning to the car, the hiker looks for the tree or target and starts walking toward it, looking at it from time to time. He kind of has a path and knows he is going in the right direction. The tree may be lost from his view, but the course can be checked by comparing the hiker's direction with the location of the tree. 

He immediately corrects the course and again, walk directly towards the tree. He does not, however, conclude that it is wrong for him to walk. Yet many of us are guilty of this conclusion when it comes to our attention that our manner of expression is off-course, missing the mark, or is wrong. 

We conclude that self-expression itself is wrong or that success for us reaching our target is wrong. 

And it's so true.

Just thinking about having goals and working towards them, allowing our automatic success mechanism to work for us and visualizing us being at that goal makes a huge difference.

We're doing that on a daily basis, we're visualizing where we want to be even though we may make a mistake along the way. 

You might as well just expect that, because we can't learn without making mistakes. 

This just had a huge impact on my thinking because even though I know those things, I don't know those things and it connected all of those dots that are out there. 

It connected that point for me that we have to have negative experiences to get to the positive, but that's okay because we can always autocorrect. 

Cool. Huh? 

So his next point is really just whatever you dwell on in your mind is going to be what will happen. 

What really matters is focusing on the successful attempt.

You might have 30 failures. Look at all of the inventors in the last several hundred years and how many times did they try something and fail miserably, but they kept on trying. 

They kept on digging deep and thinking, you know, I know that this is going to work. 

I believe down deep that this is the right thing and I'm just going to keep on going towards that goal and acting as if I already had achieved that goal. 

Dr. Maltz suggests you visualize your goal in your mind, taking 5, 10, 30 minutes a day to really visualize about where you want to be and focus on that one goal, in as much detail as you can, really hone it down to where that is what is playing on the track in your mind, because that's what your brain's gonna hold onto. And that's where your automatic success mechanism comes into action! 

Those are some of the main things Dr. Maltz discusses in his book.

There is one other thing that I love...and that is capturing the feeling of success. 

When you're working on something and you're in the zone, you are just pounding it out, you're working, your mind just has all these ideas and you're getting them out and getting things done. You know that feeling, right?

It's what is called "Getting Into State." 

If you follow Tony Robbins at all, then you know that he talks about getting into state all of the time. You can actually make yourself go into these states as you wish. 

And with practice, you will get into your "zone" quicker and quicker.

Dr. Maltz talks about playing your previous successes back in your mind, and it doesn't have to be related to your goal that you're working on right now. It is simply remembering a time when you were highly successful, when you were proud of yourself. You go back to that moment and you remember as vividly as you can every detail: who was there, everything that people said, how you felt, etc. 

That's replaying in your mind and then you are applying it to your current goal.

Did you know that your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real one? That's an amazing piece of information. Let it sink in.

It's kind of like having a really intense and emotional dream. In the dream, you're angry at someone only to wake up and you find that you're angry at that person. Have you ever done that before?

I know I have.

It's exactly like that. Your nervous system can't tell the difference so you wake up, and you're still angry at that person for something that they did in your mind. 

Fascinating, right?

We all know that our brain is a powerful thing. 

Just how powerful it is has yet to be determined. 

Dr. Maltz really makes it pretty clear that most of us aren't using our brains to its full potential.

I'm really excited about this book (if you hadn't noticed!) and I want to end this post on a high note. So remember you can't have success and think failure. 

You must look forward to living and be excited for the future.

Dr. Maltz calls it nostalgia for the future.

Nostalgia for the future. . . .  like really looking forward and being excited about it!! It's the idea that you're going to have so much more energy, so much more vitality, start living your life and really get so much more out of your life than you previously were.

And on that note, my challenge to you is to go out and start imagining life as you want it to be. You can create and establish for your future and get more out of life starting today!

I really encourage you to get this book and read it for yourself because there are so many other amazing ideas to bite into. These were just my really big takeaways. 

The book is Psycho Cybernetics by Dr. Maxwell Maltz