How I had gone from a skinny, insecure, anxious, drunken mess with no girlfriend and a series of dead-end jobs to having the answers to life…
I kept thinking, “Why isn’t anybody else reading this amazing book?”
Why don’t they teach this in school? This should be required learning. So many people would benefit from this…
Imagine my surprise when I later found out that more than 30 million people had learned these techniques and have been achieving their goals and changing their lives with Dr. Maltz’s simple, quick, and astonishing secrets!
He discovered that achieving what you want is easy…
When you stop pushing and activate your automatic success mechanism!
Dr. Maltz concluded that many people see themselves inaccurately; their perceptions are distorted by unchallenged and often erroneous beliefs embedded in their subconscious mind.
After a decade of counseling hundreds of patients, conducting extensive research on everything from German guided-missile technology to hypnosis, and testing his own evolving theories, in 1959, Dr. Maltz made a significant discovery that underpins his work…
The human mind functions much like an instrument designed to guide missiles! This “automatic goal-seeking device” is the part of the mind associated with genius.
It has the power to draw you to whatever you need to accomplish—no matter how challenged you are.
You can program it for either success or failure, depending on your self-image.
When you learn to expand your self-image, you will also be expanding your talents and capabilities so you can automatically reach your goals as your subconscious mind steers you to them like a guided missile goes to its target!
See, Dr. Maltz’s discovery centered around the fact that we all hold a “SELF-IMAGE” buried deep in our subconscious mind and that this self-image controls EVERYTHING.
Dr. Maltz understood that our internal self-image controls every aspect of our lives…What we do
- What we avoid
- Where we live
- Who we like
- Who we hate
- Who we date
- Our jobs
- Our wealth
- Our health
- Our weight
- Our personal appearance
Or, in other words … our deeply buried self-image allows us to do, or not do … EVERYTHING IN LIFE!
It clicked!
I now had a self-belief blueprint…
Staying sober, getting in shape, the improvement in my relationships, work, attitude, and circumstances were a side effect of who I had become.
The simplicity of visualizing myself differently was aligning me and naturally pushing me to become my best self daily…
It was not only changing my behavior it was changing how I saw myself which affected every aspect of my life.
I was able to break the habit of drinking and install a powerful “Keystone Habit.” Working out released me from the shackles of addiction.
Keystone Habits are where positive change begins.
Think of a Keystone Habit as one that will empower you to achieve your goals…
These accomplishments will then carry over into other aspects of your life, creating a domino effect leading to new actions, behaviors, and habits.
A Keystone Habit is particularly powerful because it can change your self-image.
And our self-image and our habits tend to go together.
Change one and you automatically change the other.
The word “habit” originally meant a garment or clothing.
They are not accidental or happenstance. We have them because they fit us.
They are consistent with our self-image and our entire personality pattern.
When we consciously and deliberately develop new and better habits, our self-image tends to outgrow the old habits and grow into a new pattern.
This is why my circumstances naturally fell into place, I was becoming the kind of person that was congruent with my goals.
Instead of creating a long list of “To Do” goals I had been creating a “To Be” goal.
Who do I need to become to accomplish my goals and sustain them?
And it wasn’t like I was using a ton of willpower to change all of this…
Or having to fight myself to make changes…
Just the hope that I could be different.
That I could be who I wanted myself to be without “trying” so hard.
And I didn’t have to depend on getting every single thing right but instead relying on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers.
Ultimately shifting, dislodging, and remaking other behavior patterns, making it easier to achieve my goals.
Instead of trying to achieve all my goals at once—leading to burnout and failure, I was naturally getting more done by doing less…
I discovered that by combining several key techniques into a simple three-step strategy, you can change your self-image to make things you want to have, or have happen to you in the future, become your reality RIGHT NOW because your mind guides you to the new you all by itself using your new self-image as the “pilot” to your new destination!
This self-belief blueprint, I now call my Self-Image Reengineering Methodology.
And it can be done instantly to replace the incorrect and limiting self-image we now have with a bright, energetic, success-oriented self-image that will allow us to accomplish anything we want automatically, training and conditioning our mind to lock onto any goals and effortlessly be directed to them without effort, willpower, or positive thinking needed!
I finally realized why my years of therapy, coaching, and online programs didn’t work.
They were focused on systems, strategies, and tactics designed to change something outside of myself so I could reach my goals.
They never revealed that the way to accomplish those things was to change my thinking about myself.
I say this because if your current self-image were a match with your goals, you would already have the thing that you desire.
You behave, feel, and, most importantly, act according to how you see yourself.
Our self-image is a premise, a foundation upon which we build our personality.
It sets the boundaries for every area of our life and establishes a pattern of behavior, and we do not deviate from that pattern.
So, no matter how hard we may try, you and I cannot outperform the image we’ve created in our minds.
If you’re wondering what your self-image is, it’s easy to figure out.
Just look at the various aspects of your life. Take a look at the results you’re getting in your relationships, income, the position you hold at work, and your personal appearance.
These are all the outer expression of the inner image.
People often attempt to change things outside themselves (such as their diet, income, or business) without changing what’s going on inside.
That approach never works.
To remake your life, you must look within yourself to alter your attitudes, your beliefs, and habits, you must build a new self-image.
As soon as you start to alter the image, everything outside will begin to change.
You can have the best systems, strategies, and coaching in the world.
But if the picture you have of yourself is someone that’s unworthy and doesn’t believe you can achieve these things, it’s never going to happen…
Your conviction, your opinion of yourself will determine your results in life…
The circumstances of your life are a direct reflection of who you have conceived yourself to be.
There can be no outer change until there is first inner change.
Until we change on the inside (create a new self-image), we will continue to be stuck in the same situations.
- We will struggle with addiction.
- We will put weight on, take it off, and then put it back on.
- We will get into a loving relationship, sabotage it, end the relationship, and then do it all over again.
- We’ll start earning more money, then stop doing the new thing we are doing, and go back to earning the amount we’ve always earned.
Why do we live this way?
We live that way because we don’t know any different.
At first, I was very skeptical that by simply changing my self-image I could get unstuck.
How could I automatically erase years of incorrect and negative programming from my family, lousy teachers, and misguided “friends” so quickly and easily.
But within a year, my attitude had improved tremendously.
I was more self-confident and poised, I was in the best shape of my life, hitting my goal of 155 pounds, I was making new friends, had a girlfriend and I had started an online business.
I had more peace of mind…
All of my circumstances had improved by improving my self-image.
As exciting as that was, just as rewarding was when I was able to share my three-step self-image reengineering method with someone who was hurting even more than even I had been.
I was having lunch with my friend Ryan, who’s in finance at a local tech company.
As we were waiting for lunch, he said, “I see how much happier you are than the last time I saw you. I sure wish you could help my brother.”
He’s struggled throughout his entire life…
He’s an alcoholic…
The poor guy is forty-three years old and things seemed to be going pretty well. He was teaching school in Thailand. He was engaged to be married. It seemed like he had finally turned his life around.
But then one day as he was crossing the street daydreaming carrying a bag of groceries and he walked in front of a bus, and it almost killed him leaving him with a pretty bad head injury…
While recovering, he went into this downward spiral of negativity and his drinking got worse…
Just recently, he lost his fiancé and job to top it off…
He was forced to move back home.
It’s like he walks around with a cloud over his head…
Then he said,
“Would you be willing to talk to him?
“Maybe if you just told him what happened to you it would give him a little positivity…”
It took me a minute to even come up with anything to say…
“Well, I don’t know…
“I’m not really a therapist, I’m not even a sponsor in AA,”
I said.
But what I was really thinking was…
“I don’t want any part of this, I’ve never done this before and would just feel like such a fraud pretending I could help somebody else.”
But as I sat there, I could see in his expression how impacted he was by the change he saw in me and how he was struggling with the pain his brother was in…
So, I said to myself, “Look, James, get over yourself; here’s a chance to help somebody that’s in a tough spot. Are you really going to pass that up? So why not take it!”
He then said..
“You don’t have to be a therapist or anything but, I just think it would help him to see there is light at the end of the tunnel.”
I said,
“Ok…
I guess I can.”
So the day before I was scheduled to get together with Pat…
I started asking myself,
“What am I actually going to tell him? What was it I did? If I’m going to advise him on something I gotta figure out what was working for me…?
“What did I really do?