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.

The answer to aggression is not to eradicate it, but to understand it, and provide proper and appropriate channels for its expression.

They indicate, he said, that providing a proper outlet for aggression is as important, if not more so, than providing for love and tenderness.

Loneliness is a way of self-protection. Lines of communication with other people—and especially any emotional ties—are cut down. It is a way to protect our idealized self against exposure, hurt, humiliation. The lonely personality is afraid of other people. The lonely person often complains that he has no friends, and there are no people to mix with. In most cases, he unwittingly arranges things in this manner because of his passive attitude, that it is up to other people to come to him, to make the first move, to see that he is entertained. It never occurs to him that he should contribute something to any social situation.

It is an old psychological axiom that constant exposure to the object of fear immunizes against the fear.

If he can feel resentful enough, and thereby “prove” the injustice, some magic process will reward him by making “not so” the event or circumstance that caused the resentment. In this sense resentment is a mental resistance to, a non-acceptance of, something which has already happened. The word itself comes from two Latin words: re meaning “back,” and sentire meaning “to feel.” Resentment is an emotional rehashing, or refighting, of some event in the past.