Maxwell Maltz

His plight is somewhat comparable to the young man who cannot secure a job because he has no experience, and cannot acquire experience because he cannot get a job.

“Nothing succeeds like success.” We learn to function successfully by experiencing success. Memories of past successes act as built-in “stored information,”

Understanding the psychology of the self can mean the difference between success and failure, love and hate, bitterness and happiness. The discovery of the real self can rescue a crumbling marriage, recreate a faltering career, and transform victims of “personality failure.”
On another plane, discovering your real self means the difference between freedom and the compulsions of conformity.

1. All your actions, feelings, behaviors—even your abilities—are always consistent with this self-image. In short, you will “act like” the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.

Theatre of the Mind. I’d close my eyes, then remember and relive my best moments—seeing them play out like a mental movie. My victories. My successes. My happiest times.

Response means tension. Lack of response means relaxation. It has been proved in scientific laboratory experiments that you absolutely cannot feel angry, fearful, anxious, insecure, “unsafe” as long as your muscles remain perfectly relaxed. All these things are, in essence, our own feelings.

Relaxation means—no response. Therefore, in your daily practice of relaxation, you are learning disinhibition as well as providing yourself with nature’s own do-it-yourself tranquilizer, which you can take with you into your daily activities.

Tranquilizers work because they greatly reduce, or eliminate, our own response to disturbing outside stimuli.

Tranquilizers do not change the environment. The disturbing stimuli are still there. We are still able to recognize them intellectually, but we do not respond to them emotionally.

In substance they reduce or tone down our over-response to negative feedback

There are a great many “bells,” or disturbing stimuli, in our various environmental situations that we have become conditioned to, and that we continue to respond to out of habit, whether or not the response makes any sense.