Psycho cybernetics pdf download

Try this little experiment for 21 days, and see what happens. Tight, quick, decisive. Loose, meandering, tentative, time-consuming zig zags. You accelerate personal development and goal achievement by providing your ASM with a clear, precisely detailed, vividly imagined, and perfectly communicated "target.

He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing. Schwab, Industrialist. I magination plays a far more important role in our lives than most of us realize. I have seen this demonstrated many times in my practice. A par- ticularly memorable instance concerned a patient who was literally forced to visit my office by his family.

He was a man of about 40, unmarried, who held down a routine job during the day and kept to himself in his apartment when the work day was over, never going any- where, never doing anything.

He had had many such jobs and never seemed able to stay with any of them for any great length of time. His problem was that he had a rather large nose and ears that protruded a little more than normal.

He considered himself "ugly" and "funny looking. He hardly felt "safe" even in his own home. The poor man even imagined that his family was ashamed of him because he was "peculiar looking," not like "other people. His nose was of the classical Roman type, and his ears, though somewhat large, attracted no more attention than those of thousands of people with.

In desperation, his family brought him to me to see if I could help him. I saw that he did not need surgery, only an under- standing of the fact that his imagination had wrought such havoc with his self-image that he had lost sight of the truth. He was not really ugly. People did not consider him odd and laugh at him because of his appearance.

His imagination alone was responsible for his misery. His imagination had set up an automatic, negative failure mechanism within him and it was operating full blast, to his extreme misfortune. Fortunately, after several sessions with him and with the help of his family, he was able gradually to realize that the power of his own imag- ination was responsible for his plight, and he succeeded in building up a true self-image and achieving the confidence he needed by applying creative imagination rather than destructive imagination.

You might say he needed emotional surgery, not physical surgery with an actual scalpel. In the latter years of my surgical practice, I became quite skilled at talking myself out of business! This is an analogy for the experiences of thousands of people, quite possibly, in one way or another, including you. No, you may not feel ashamed of your nose or ears or any other physical feature, and you may not be a recluse. But many people believe there is something about them that causes others to look down on them, to ridicule them behind their backs, to reject them-something that prevents them from progressing in certain ways.

One of the smartest, most successful and prolific idea men I've ever known in the advertising field has had a lifelong pattern of rising to high income, then suddenly experiencing circumstances that "pull the rug out from under him," so that he must rebuild from scratch his reputation and his finances. One month he was living in a mansion, the next in a motel. He has admitted to me and to others that he has spent his entire life trying to escape the iron-fisted grip of what he calls his "white trash ancestry" and, to paraphrase Al Pacino in one of the Godfather movies, just as he gets out, he is again pulled back.

Of course, this "thing" that keeps pulling him back does not exist in the physical world, only inside his own self-image. It is his "ugly nose and big ears.

Ironically, even though his entire business is "the imagination business," he has yet to discover how to use his imagination as a scalpel in emotional surgery, to rid his self-image of its "big nose. Creative imagination is not something reserved for the poets, the philosophers, the inventors.

It enters into our every act. Imagination sets the goal picture that 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 the most important statement to be gleaned from this entire book:. Human beings always act and feel and perform in accordance with what they imagine to be true about themselves and their environment. You cannot long escape or outperform that picture.

You can dissect it, analyze it, uncover what is in it that is not true about yourself, and alter it. You can modify it without archaeological examination of the past. But you cannot escape it. You will always act and perform-and experience appropriate results-in accordance with what you imagine to be true about yourself and your environment.

This is a basic and fundamental law of mind. It is the way we are built. When we see this law of mind graphically and dramatically demonstrated in a hypnotized subject, we are prone to think that there is something occult or supernormal at work, or to discredit it as sim- ple stage illusion. Actually, what we are witnessing often is the normal operating processes of the human brain and nervous system.

For example, if a good hypnotic subject is told that she is at the North Pole, she will not only shiver and appear to be cold, her body will react just as if she were cold, and goose pimples will develop. The same phenomena has been demonstrated on wide awake college stu- dents by asking them to imagine that one hand is immersed in ice water.

Thermometer readings show that the temperature drops in the "treated" hand. Tell a hypnotized subject that your finger is a red hot poker and he will not only grimace with pain at your touch, but his cardiovascular and lymphatic systems will react just as if your finger were a red hot poker and produce inflammation and perhaps a blister on the skin. These are elementary experiments just one step away from the rather cruel but common children's game, the practical joke played at school-and sometimes by adults at work.

In this prank, a person is secretly targeted by the group, then one person after another engages the target in conversation, asking "Aren't you feeling well, Bob? Before long Bob is feeling queasy and weak. Bob may even actually become so sick he must lie down or go home.

Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imag- ined experience and a "real" one. Your nervous system reacts appro- priately to what you think or imagine to be true.

This phenomenon that can be produced as a practical joke or by a hypnotist on stage for entertainment is actually identical to, or illus- trative of, the basic process that governs much of our behavior, and that can be taken ahold of and deliberately used to advantage. Ironically, the article reported that those who knew him considered him popular.

Here is the text of this young man's suicide note: To the world: When I was a child, other children abused and mistreated me because I was weaker and uglier than they. I was a sensitive, bashful boy and was teased because of my face and long nose. The more they offended me, the more they teased. I became afraid of people. I knew that many of them hated me for things that I was not responsible for-my sentimental nature and my appearance.

I was unable to speak to anyone. A teacher spelled my name with two "F's" although it has only one, yet I became so backward I was unable to correct her and there- fore spelled it with two F's throughout my school career.

God forgive everyone for this. I am afraid of the world but I'm not afraid to die. At the time, a professor at the university judged this to be the most severe case of an inferiority complex ever known. Believe me, this young man's desperation, which first killed his self- image and then led him to take his own life, mirrors the same desper- ation affecting thousands and thousands of people-and missed entirely or underestimated in importance by the people around them.

In fact, suicide among teenagers in recent years has reached epidemic proportions, though rarely discussed in the media. Anorexia is a chilling demonstration of the hypnotic power of negative imagination. Gilbert Hefter describe an encounter with a year- old girl, Ellen, shown on the CBS television program 48 Hours in Ellen weighed only 82 pounds, and looked like a sickly child wasting away, but Ellen was firmly convinced she was fat.

As a result, she avoided meals, refused to eat or would even purge herself after eat- ing. In this child's hospital room, the television reporter interviewing her got her to stand in front of a full-length mirror and asked her if she saw how gaunt and weak she looked.

The reporter then tried fact: "But you now weigh only 82 pounds. Do you think that is a person who is fat? So, determined not to eat, Ellen would pull out the intravenous feeding needles if not closely supervised.

For parents, teachers, counselors, and coaches, this should be a cautionary tale, a vivid reminder of the need to be ever vigilant for some young person whose self-image is shrinking so dramatically that self-inflicted physical harm is likely to follow. For all, it is a vivid illustration of the incredible power of imagi- nation. A person can so magnify the importance of some flaw, and of the world's response to the flaw, with his own negative imagination that he commits suicide!

A person can similarly so "color" her percep- tions of her strengths and opportunities with her own positive imagi- nation that she accomplishes the most amazing things. Theodore Xenophon Barber conducted extensive research into the phenomena of hypnosis, both when he was associ- ated with the psychology department of American University in Washington, D.

Writing in Science Digest, he said:. We found that hypnotic subjects are able to do surprising things only when convinced that the hypnotist's words are true statements '".

When the hypnotist has guided the subject to the point where he is convinced that the hypnotist's words are true statements, the subject then behaves differently because he thinks and believes differently. The phenomena of hypnosis have always seemed mysterious because it has always been difficult to understand how belief can bring about such unusual behavior. It always seemed as if there must be something more, some unfathomable force or power, at work.

However, the plain truth is that when a subject is convinced that he is deaf, he behaves as if he is deaf; when he is convinced that he is insensi- tive to pain, he can undergo surgery without anesthesia. The mysterious force or power does not exist.

Note that his comments were published in Today, hypno- sis as a tool of therapy is widely accepted and used. For many, hypno- sis and self-hypnosis to facilitate weight loss makes the surgical quick fix of liposuction unnecessary, a perfect analogy to my examples of emotional surgery versus actual surgery. In these cases, hypnosis is the scalpel. In dentistry, hypnosis is used to facilitate treatment of the pho- bic patient with virtually uncontrollable anxiety and, in many instances, proves to be a perfectly successful alternative to the prob- lematic solution of anesthesia.

In fact, many people virtually "sleep walk" through their entire lives under unrecognized hypnotic suggestion. In fact many of them live in a trance and need a dose of reality. You are still in the hypnotic trance from forty years ago! Still, a little reflection will show why it is a very good thing for us that we do feel and act according to what we believe or imagine to be true.

All of this does not mean the system itself is "bad"; it only requires learning how to better use the "system. Truth Determines Action and Behavior The human brain and nervous system are engineered to react auto- matically and appropriately to the problems and challenges in the environment.

For example, a man does not need to stop and think that self-survival requires that he run if he meets a grizzly bear on a trail. He does not need to decide to become afraid. The fear response is both automatic and appropriate. First, it makes him want to flee. The fear then triggers bodily mechanisms that "soup up" his muscles so that he can run faster than he has ever run before. His heart beat is quickened. Adrenaline, a powerful muscle stimulant, is poured into the bloodstream.

All bodily functions not necessary to running are shut down. The stomach stops working and all available blood is sent to the muscles. Breathing is much faster and the oxygen supply to the muscles is increased manyfold.

All this, of course, is nothing new. Most of us learned it in high school. What we have not been so quick to realize, however, is that the brain and nervous system that reacts automatically to environment is the same brain and nervous system that tells us what the environment is.

The reactions of the man meeting the bear are commonly thought of as due to "emotion" rather than to ideas. Yet it was an idea-informa- tion received from the outside world and evaluated by the mind that sparked the so-called "emotional reactions. In short, the man on the trail reacted to what he thought, believed, or imagined the environment to be.

The messages brought to us from the environment consist of nerve impulses from the various sense organs. These nerve impulses are decoded, inter- preted, and evaluated in the brain and made known to us in the form of ideas or mental images. In the final analysis, it is these mental images that we react to. Note that I've used the terms thought, believed, and imagined as synonymous.

In affecting your entire system, they are the same. 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. You have certain mental images of yourself, your world, and the people around you, and you behave as though these images were the truth, the reality, rather than the things they represent. Suppose, for example, that the man on the trail had not met a real bear, but a movie actor dressed in a bear costume.

If he thought and imagined the actor to be a bear, his emotional and nervous reactions would have been exactly the same. Or suppose he met a large shaggy dog, which his fear-ridden imagination mistook for a bear. Again, he would react automatically to what he believed to be true concerning himself and his environment. It follows that, if our ideas and mental images concerning our- selves are distorted or unrealistic, then our reaction to our environ- ment will likewise be inappropriate.

Can these causative factors change? Consider the child raised in an intentionally segre- gated environment by racists. The child could be a white person in a family of white supremacists who devoutly believe that blacks are "mud people," evil, and a threat to their well-being, or the child could be black in a family with comparable hatred for whites.

Either way, the child is programmed with certain beliefs that will govern her behavior. In her imagination, she constructs certain truths that will be very dif- ficult to modify as she matures. However, some people make a degree change in their beliefs and behavior at some point in their lives. These days, this has even become a popular staple of the confronta- tion-style daytime 1V talk shows.

How does a person change? Now consider the child raised in a poor family, made up of peo- ple who profoundly believe that their unhappy circumstances are the fault of evil rich people and a corrupt government, who constantly program the child with class warfare ideas, and who insist that they just cannot get ahead no matter what they do. This truth may very well block that person's academic achievement, direct him away from college, have him blindly follow his father to work in the factory or the coal mine.

Well, I show my age with "coal mine," I suppose. Yet even today, the basic path of accepting poverty as "fact" is prevalent in many, many people. But how does one person rise out of such a back- ground to become a highly successful entrepreneur, for example? Through books he's exposed to, people he sees on television, the influ- ence of a mentor, life experiences, one way or another challenging what he believed to be true, discovering it is based on illusion, and replacing that truth with another truth.

Just as the Knights Of Spanish Harlem I mentioned earlier trans- formed from street toughs to chess champions, from likely criminals to model citizens pursuing adult careers as doctors, lawyers, and busi- nesspersons, you can change from anything to anything by changing your self-image, by providing it with new truth.

From fat and flabby to fit and strong. From mousy and timid to assertive and confident. From clumsy and awkward to capable and graceful. In turn, it relays the appropriate new directives to your servo-mechanism, and a new truth exists, a new reality occurs. Why Not Imagine Yourself Successful? Realizing that our actions, feelings, and behavior are the result of our own images and beliefs gives us the lever that psychology has always needed for changing personality.

It opens a powerful psychological door to gaining skill, success, and happiness. Mental pictures offer us an opportunity to practice new traits and attitudes, which otherwise we could not do.

This is possible because, again, your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and one that is vividly imagined. If we picture ourselves performing in a certain manner, it is nearly the same as the actual performance.

Mental practice is as pow- erful as actual practice. Today, it is widely accepted, having been proved by countless trials and experi- ments. Athletes of every stripe routinely rely on mental or imagination practice. For example, consider Dr.

Richard Coop's advice to golfers, as follows italics are mine :. Before you play any shot, you need to have a mental picture of how you want the ball to react once you deliver the clubhead to the ball.

You need to have a definite, positive visualization of what your shot will look like. The picture should indicate the trajectory, the direction, the spot where you intend the ball to land, and how far you want the ball to roll when it lands Your options in this visualization are limited only by your imag- ination.

You might see the green as a pin cushion ready to accept your shot Visualization is one of the most individual aspects of golf psychology. Jack Nicklaus has said, "I never hit a golf shot without having a sharp picture of it in my head. First I 'see' where I want the ball to fin- ish. Then I 'see' it going there; its trajectory and landing.

The next 'scene' shows me making the swing that will turn the previous images into reality. Coop's instructions, and the instructions in this book. It's important to understand that imagination practice need not be restricted to your golf or tennis swing. The same principles of men- tal practice apply to virtually anything, including broader behaviors, such as speaking up confidently and asserting your opinions in busi- ness meetings versus remaining intimidated and silent and regretting it later , or directly asking prospects for orders rather than leaving sales presentations "hanging" with wimpy, vague endings.

And so on. I have developed a very specific regimen for mental or imagina- tion practice, using what I call The Theater of the Mind, which I will get to later. Coop also goes on to describe virtually the same "mental movies technique" I first began teaching in the late s and wrote about in the original version of this book.

Jack Nicklaus uses the word "scene"; he is playing out his successful shot as a little mental movie, literally stepping out of actual play and into the Theater of the Mind to watch the movie, then stepping back out to experience the deja vu effect. In an article in GolJMagazine Guly , Jack Nicklaus said, "The more deeply you ingrain what I like to call my going-to- the-movies discipline, the more effective you will become at hitting the shots you want to hit.

I say "remarkably" because, as far as I know, Mr. Nicklaus has never read this book, although he has likely been influenced by the many other golfers and golf coaches who have. However, it's really not all that remarkable, since it seems almost all peak performers find their way to this technique one way or another.

In a few moments, we'll talk more about the specifics of these mental movies. Let me first tell you about some of the scientific doc- umentation that supports the entire idea of imagination practice. In one of the first controlled experiments I read about, psychologist R. Vandll proved that mental practice in throwing darts at a target, wherein the person sits for a period each day in front of the target, and imagines throwing darts at it, improves aim just as much as actually throwing darts.

Research Quarterly reported an experiment on the effects of men- tal practice on improving skill in sinking basketball free throws. One group of students actually practiced throwing the ball every day for 20 days, and were scored on the first and last days. A second group was scored on the first and last days, and engaged in no sort of practice in between. A third group was scored on the first day, then spent 20 min- utes a day, imagining that they were throwing the ball at the goal.

When they missed they would imagine that they corrected their aim accordingly. The second group, which had no sort of practice, showed no improvement.

This particular experiment has been widely reported and refer- enced, and since repeated at many universities over the years. Of course, none of this is infallible. Mter all, Shaq's problem with foul shots remains a mystery! However, while an inexact science, the use of imagination practice is nevertheless an effective science, a proven and practical means of improving skills or altering imbedded "truths" in order to alter behavior.

In an article in Tennis World Magazine, they noted "an important ele- ment of self-healing is a mental image that projects a positive future outcome. This visualization stimulates your mind and body and cre- ates an intention to heal When you use imagination, mental pictures and suggestion, you can communicate with your body and make it respond. If every hospital patient and every person entering physical rehabilitation were given a copy of Psycho-Cybernetics, they would be considerably better off.

Keep this in mind if you ever have a loved one or friend in such circumstances. This article is so revealing and useful, we've posted more extensive excerpts at the Psycho-Cybernetics Foundation's web site, www. You will also find other articles, book reviews and book excerpts directly related to this book, in a special section of this web site. And what is this magic that accomplishes so much for salespeople? From Mr. Roth's book:. It is something called role-playing, and you should know about it, because if you will let it, it may help you to double your sales.

He wrote several books, among which Psycho-Cybernetics was a long-time bestseller - influencing many subsequent self-help teachers. His orientation towards a system of ideas that would provide self-help is considered the forerunner of the now popular self-help books.

The word cybernetic comes from the Greek for 'steersman', and in the modern sense usually refers to systems of control and communication in machines and animals: how, for instance, a computer or a mouse organises itself to achieve a task. Maltz applied the science to man to form psycho-cybernetics.

However, while inspired by the development of sophisticated machines, his book denounced the idea that man can be reduced to a machine. Psycho-cybernetics bridges the gap between our mechanistic models of the brain's functioning cliches like 'Your brain is a wonderful computer' , and the knowledge of ourselves as being a lot more than machine.

Maltz's genius was in saying that while we were 'machines', and while the dynamics of goal-setting and self-image might best be described in mechanistic terms, the fantastic variety of our desires and our ability to create new worlds were uniquely human. What could never be reduced to machine analogies were the fires of imagination, ambition and will. Author : Eric Matthes Publisher: dpunkt. Fangen Sie an! Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3.

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